AR: Well, I am critical of Blair, but no, I don't think the Conservatives would have handled things differently. Like Nick, I was a supporter of the war at the time but even if you were and can still muster arguments for it you cannot avoid recognising the terrible mistakes that we made. One thing people consistently got wrong about Blair, especially on the Left, was that he was a poodle to Bush — he was the opposite of this. If anything, Blair was too ready to join the project, although he had to mask this to an extent: as he was manoeuvring his party and his country towards backing the invasion he didn't lay out proper conditions for British participation. Now you can say Bush might have turned round and said "we don't need the British anyway", and this was what frightened Blair. He thought that if he had shown a scintilla of hesitation, Bush would have dumped him and gone off and done it on his own. But do remember, Colin Powell was saying to Bush that the US needed allies and if they didn't have the British as allies they wouldn't get anybody else. There are loads of other people, William Cohen, Condoleezza Rice, saying that Blair giving such instinctive support after 9/11 had put a lot of credit in the bank with the American people — he's one of those rare British Prime Ministers, Thatcher and Churchill are others, who have name recognition almost as instant as their own president's. So he had a lot of credit with them, a lot of credit with both Democrats and Republicans and one of my criticisms of him is that he never parlayed that into anything. 

He failed to be absolutely sure, for instance, that Bush had a proper post-war plan, before he signed up. As a result, his own senior foreign policy adviser and his own ambassador in Washington basically concluded that the Americans took the British for granted. Post-war, I'm afraid, when it was clearly all going wrong, he was never really prepared to eyeball Bush and say, "George, it's time to face up to the consequences of our actions." Iraq was spiralling into this awful, bloody mess and we weren't adjusting policy quickly enough to do anything about it. I'm afraid it's a temperament thing. One thing Tony hated doing, whether it was with foreign leaders, Gordon Brown or reshuffles, was personal confrontation. He didn't work that way, he believed in charming engagement to get underneath other people's defences. Now that can often work but when it came to Bush it was no good. He could never read the Riot Act to Bush, and he should have done, especially when things were clearly going horribly wrong after the war.

NC: Where do you think the combination of Blair and Brown leaves the Labour Party? Let's start with foreign policy, because it's hugely unfashionable to say this at the moment but Blair was probably the most idealistic, and in some ways the most left-wing Labour leader there has ever been. He wanted to stop oppression, he wanted to overthrow tyrants, whether it was Milosevic or Saddam Hussein or the Taliban...

AR:...Or the Burmese junta. I admired that in him. I shared his frustration because I'm a liberal interventionist — not that you can do it everywhere but if you can't do it everywhere that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it somewhere. Milosevic probably would have got away with it had it not been for Blair. In Sierra Leone, he's a hero because his liberal interventionism worked there.

NC: What I'm asking is, because of Iraq, where does that leave, if you like, a liberal foreign policy?

AR: That is the terrible legacy of Iraq, and it made Tony Blair into both the best advocate of liberal interventionism and the worst. I believe in liberal interventionism and if you can get rid of dictators who are menacing their neighbours or perpetrating the worst horrors against their own populations, I'm quite in favour of taking the opportunity. The problem is that Iraq was so badly done, was such a catastrophe, that it is going to be very hard for the next generation of political leaders to make the case for intervention.