I. The Pitch

The citizens of Kazakhstan celebrated the 20th anniversary of independence from the Soviet Union, which had been achieved in 1991, in a variety of ways. In December 2011, the country’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, unveiled a model of the Arc de Triomphe in the Kazakh capital, Astana. At around the same time, but in a different spirit, oil workers occupied the central square in the western city of Zhanaozen, where they had been on strike for months to protest for higher wages and better working conditions. Kazakh police fired on the unarmed demonstrators, killing at least 15 and injuring scores of others.

Nazarbayev, with his authoritarian tastes, has been the president of Kazakhstan for as long as his country has been a country. His un-interrupted run has much to do with the fact that he has never held an election that met even the most forgiving international standards. To memorialize Kazakhstan’s independence, in 2012 Nazarbayev appeared in a documentary. The 67-minute video, In the Stirrups of Time, opens with shots of Nazarbayev greeting his people interspersed with scenes of the sun rising over iconic Kazakh locales. Harp and piano play in the background.

The first recognizable person to appear on-camera, after Nazar­bayev, is, to the uninitiated, an unlikely one. Two minutes into the documentary, former British prime minister Tony Blair materializes on the screen in suit and tie, against the backdrop of a white fireplace. Blair had been hired as a consultant to Nazarbayev two months before the Zhanaozen massacre, and during the first two years of his contract, according to the Kazakh media, he would be paid $40 million. The British press speculated that part of Blair’s role was to help the Kazakh president secure the Nobel Peace Prize—an unlikely prospect. Blair’s office has denied that Blair was involved in an attempt to secure a Nobel Prize for Nazarbayev; it has also said that the contract figures were wrong, and that the fees were used to fund Blair’s charities. In the documentary, in what are clearly cherry-picked sound bites, Blair says that Kazakhstan “is almost unique, I would say, in its cultural diversity, in the way it brings different faiths together and cultures together.” He finds the people of Kazakhstan to be “smart” and “capable” and “very proud” of their country. Other politicians appear in the film, but the camera returns to Blair again and again.

In the years since his movie appearance, Blair has continued to work for Nazarbayev. To help with the work, Blair hired Portland Communications, a firm run by his former media adviser, Tim Allan. Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former press secretary, works for Portland as an adviser. Blair also facilitated a meeting in the summer of 2013 between Nazarbayev and the current British prime minister, David Cameron.

Watching Blair in Nazarbayev’s documentary, one is reminded of a pitchman in a late-night infomercial. “If you look back over 20 years,” Blair says at one point, “you have to say the progress is remarkable.” Looking back over the past few years, you have to wonder how Blair the pitchman would assess his own progress. Various former associates cited a famous observation by the British politician Enoch Powell, that “all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” It’s hard to imagine a politician who personifies Powell’s statement more acutely than Tony Blair, who has gone from being one of the most popular prime ministers in Great Britain’s history to being one of the most reviled figures in British public life. A man with aspirations to global leadership—even to global moral leadership—is now regarded by many of his countrymen as a shill for big corporations and deep-pocketed and dubious regimes. In terms of personal wealth, Blair is said to be worth an estimated £100 million ($150 million), a figure he denies. Today, Blair rarely makes public appearances in London. In 2010, he canceled a book party to celebrate the publication of his memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, to avoid the inevitable protests. Blair wasn’t invited to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011. Last January, a London waiter attempted a citizen’s arrest of Blair for alleged war crimes arising from the invasion of Iraq.