Traсking changes to the stylistic behaviour of Tony Blair as Prime Minister and former Prime Minister

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.