Episode one of Michael Waldman’s new three-part biography bears the subtitle “Who Are You?”. As well as the normal business of harvesting archive clips and interviewing his subject’s colleagues and rivals to build a picture of past events, Waldman has gained interviews with Tony Blair, his wife, Cherie, and several of their children in an effort to capture the character of the politician who was re-elected twice as British prime minister. The question is: what sort of man is Blair?
It is an approach that many political film-makers find impossible to resist. Detailed factual arguments can get boring, and overarching theses about the power structures that lift politicians into place would take too long to explain. But a narrative based on an individual’s psychology, where major events happen because a personality has imposed itself on the world? That is a source of readily relatable drama.
