Few think Tony Blair is the right man to save Gaza. Why does he?

The word “messianic” has been applied to Tony Blair, even by people who like him and who have worked with him. It is probably not the best term, with its biblical connotations, to describe his role in Israel-Palestine. But it accurately conveys his belief that he has exceptional gifts in bringing together the apparently irreconcilable.

His self-confidence is not unjustified. Within a year of becoming prime minister he had negotiated a settlement in Northern Ireland. If this gave him a high opinion of his ability to bridge ancient hatreds, who could blame him?

He went on, a year later, to mobilise the divided Nato alliance, including a reluctant Bill Clinton, to force Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian dictator, to abandon his attempt to drive the Kosovo Albanian population out of their homeland.

These triumphs led to the hubris of the invasion of Iraq, when Blair thought that he would be able to persuade the British people that a different US president, George W Bush, was right to remove another dictator.

“I passed a demonstrator the other day,” he said before the 2001 election, before 9/11 and Iraq. “He was shouting and bawling, and I said, I wonder what he’s like, what he really thinks? Probably you could sit down in a room and have a perfectly rational conversation with him.”

He continued to believe in his exceptional powers when he left office, taking up the role as envoy to the Middle East, acting on behalf of the UN, the US, the EU and Russia. His brief was to help develop the infrastructure of Palestine so that it would be capable of independent statehood. It was the essential underpinning of the high rhetoric of the two-state solution, involving Blair in unglamorous negotiations about sewage farms and mobile phone networks. But he always knew that it was the high politics of relations between the US administration, the Israeli government and the Arab countries that would decide the issue, and he worked tirelessly at that level as well.

To no avail. He stood down after eight years, in 2015, with the cause of Palestinian statehood no nearer realisation.

His ambition was not confined to the Middle East. He allowed his name to be put forward for the new post of president of the EU in 2009, although there was never a realistic chance that the leaders of EU countries – including Angela Merkel of Germany – would appoint someone who would so threaten their own power. They appointed an obscure Belgian instead.

Such post-prime-ministerial ambitions might have seemed delusional, but there was a Churchillian quality to Blair’s insistence that he would “never give up”.

He never did. Within weeks of the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, discussed with Blair a plan to install him as a “humanitarian coordinator” for the Gaza Strip, as a way of softening international criticism of civilian suffering caused by the war on Hamas. Nothing came of that, either, but Blair carried on talking to the power brokers, including Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who gave him access to the president.

Blair, now 72, laid it on thick at a meeting in the White House last month, telling the president that he had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, and presenting a plan, mostly crafted by Blair himself, for the US-led governance of Gaza after a ceasefire.

In the past few days, Blair’s plan has been agreed by the US, Israel and seven Arab countries. Despite a Hamas statement yesterday that Blair is “an unwelcome figure in the Palestinian context”, it is assumed that Hamas will sign up to the deal.

Trump’s announcement yesterday of the plan for a “Board of Peace” mentioned Blair. “One of the people that wants to be on the board is UK former prime minister Tony Blair,” said Trump, as if Blair’s role had not been decided, but he went on to describe him as a “good man, very good man”.

It would be extraordinary if Tony Blair’s energy, persistence and optimism – bordering on delusion – were to yield the prize of peace in Gaza. And even more extraordinary if he, so reviled by so many for his role in another part of the Middle East, should end up alongside Donald Trump as a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.