Abstract
This article features the communicative behaviour of Tony Blair in his premier and post-premier years. It puts forward and corroborates the hypothesis that about two years after his landslide victory in the parliamentary election, Blair switched his strategy from that of an ardent reformer and a pacifist to a hawk, opportunist and conformist, and stuck to it to the end of his legislatures. The charges against Blair in 2016 on the nation’s involvement in the Iraqi military campaign in 2003 caused him to change his stylistic behaviour. Special emphasis is laid on how Blair had long exploited a series of communicative tactics with the intent to manipulate mass consciousness. These include epithets, syntactic repetitions and rhetorical questions; they become frequent in post-premier years. Blair’s selected discourses in 2003, when he was campaigning for Britain’s military involvement in Iraq, and in 2016, when he was trying to justify his actions in court, reveal deception markers, specifically a distribution of I / we pronouns in text, which point to Blair’s evasion strategy. A meaningful part of Blair’s manipulative strategy was to create and sustain several political myths, including ‘appeal for unity’, ‘creation of the Evil opposition’, and ‘appeal to democratic countries as a legitimate source of power’. These were drawn on ungrounded and unverifiable statements.
Highlights
This paper attempts to provide new insights into the language profile of Tony Blair, a UK Prime Minister (1997–2007) who launched a new Labour policy, questioned the essence of monarchy, and involved Britain in a military conflict in Iraq.Special emphasis is laid on the contrastive analysis of Tony Blair’s premier and post-premier rhetoric, with the intent to tracek the changing stylistic behavior and manipulative discourse of the ex-premier
Party Convention, October 1, 2002; The Opening Speech at the House of Commons Debate on the Iraq Crisis, March 18, 2003; General election victory speech, May 6, 2005; On London Explosions, July 7, 2005; and Blair’s resignation speech, May 10, 2007.1 They embrace the most significant events of Blair’s premiership and we find them most revealing for research purposes
Of special interest are the speeches made after resignation, all related to foreign and domestic issues: Tony Blair’s statement in response to the Iraq war inquiry, 2016; Tony Blair’s speech on blocking Brexit, 2017; Remarks by Tony Blair on receiving the Lincoln Leadership Award, 2018
Summary
This paper attempts to provide new insights into the language profile of Tony Blair, a UK Prime Minister (1997–2007) who launched a new Labour policy, questioned the essence of monarchy, and involved Britain in a military conflict in Iraq. Special emphasis is laid on the contrastive analysis of Tony Blair’s premier and post-premier rhetoric, with the intent to tracek the changing stylistic behavior and manipulative discourse of the ex-premier. Contrastive analysis of a politician’s premier and post-premier years is a relatively new subject of political discourse studies as there have been few works on the subject recently. These include the work of Ernest Zhang and William L.
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