By Sean O’GRADY
I must admit that there has been a surprising, if somewhat fantastical, amount of talk in recent days about Tony Blair’s return to the prime ministership. The extraordinary outcry over his five-thousand-word essay describing the mess the country and the Labour Party are in has attracted a great deal of attention for someone who has been out of power for almost 20 years. It was truly unexpected and unprecedented in its contempt for his successor, surpassed only by Ted Heath’s “unbelievable rage” in his vindictive cold war against Margaret Thatcher. At least Heath had a strong reason for his anger, given that she had ousted him from office and there was a gulf between them on fundamental issues, particularly Europe. Blair has no such excuse. Keir Starmer, as we may recall, was widely regarded as the closest thing to a hawk the party had managed to get since Blair himself gradually drifted away from Gordon Brown, and Blair seemed to have few serious disagreements with his future successor.
Even now, Blair manages to give Starmer some indirect credit for rebuilding the party after the Corbyn era – though only to the point where it became an “acceptable” and “standard” alternative to the doomed and discredited Tories. (Starmer seems too polite to point out that John Major’s defeat in 1997 was equally inevitable.) However, the two are reportedly not on good terms, despite – or perhaps because – of the fact that they are both progressive lawyers from North London. I am not sure what the result of a “fun” opinion poll pitting Sir Tony against Sir Keir would be. However, I suspect the results would be of little comfort to the current exhausted occupant of the Prime Minister’s Office – even if that occupant is still there, against all odds, defiant as the “useless plastic pillar” that Boris Johnson once called him. And this comes just weeks after Starmer was openly attacked by his own MPs and deemed politically dead in media circles.
Some of my colleagues, with a warped sense of history, gleefully point out that, although Blair is 73, he remains energetic, and that Winston Churchill was about the same age when he led Britain through its darkest hour in 1940. In a new YouGov poll, conducted after Blair’s essay Playing with Fire, the question “Who do you think would be the better prime minister today, Keir Starmer or Tony Blair?” gave Blair a two-point lead over the incumbent. When the time comes, the man comes. Or maybe not. The essential point here, made more to illuminate the state of the Labour Party than as a practical proposition, is that Blair – or, more accurately, someone like him – cannot be elected leader.
As the old joke goes, Blair did so much for the Labour Party that they don’t know how to forgive him. He won three general elections, transformed the country for the better – both socially and economically; he crushed the Tories and brought about a decade of steady, uninterrupted growth – with low inflation and plenty of jobs. “Cool Britannia” was better than it sounds, and he left Britain richer and freer than he found it. The Iraq war was a disaster, but that’s just one reason why Labour activists hate him. Like Blair himself, I have the feeling that Labour disliked the agnostic way he did politics. They would rather be clean and lose than compromise and win. As Blair himself put it in his long treatise, “The government is governing from a fundamentally traditional Labour position of the ‘soft left’, firmly entrenched in the party’s comfort zone.” As he often observed with a grim sigh during the barren years of the 1980s: “Labour loves a loser.”
In other words, New Labour was essentially an aberration and was only accepted by the membership after the party had suffered four successive crushing defeats by the Conservatives in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992. Entire political careers had been wasted in opposition, waiting for the pendulum to swing back. Labour is essentially a party of stubborn, slow learners who will only meet the electorate halfway when there is no other alternative. This would happen again after the 2010 defeat – followed by 2015 (under the typical “soft left” Ed Miliband), 2017 (albeit by a narrower margin, with a bona fide socialist at the helm) and 2019 (a rout). Only then would they turn to the centre, and Starmer had to make some cynical promises to defeat Rebecca Long-Bailey convincingly in 2020. The burgeoning left, despite appearances, was neither complete nor permanent. The pitiful size of the left-wing trend can be measured precisely at around four percentage points – that was the percentage of the vote that Liz Kendall received in the 2015 leadership contest, and that was the same as Wes Streeting’s result in the last party membership survey. Blair’s dream of New Labour becoming the pivot, the “radical centre” for a reorganisation of the British party system, did not survive long after his departure. As the mockery his former colleagues heaped on his essay reminds us, he and his ideas remain as unpopular as ever.
His old party is as ruthless to him as he is to them, and for reasons far deeper than Iraq, there will be no reconciliation. Starmer, in his response to Blair on his Substack as prime minister, was cool and polite, but said, among other things, that “clearly, we have very different views on the conflict in Iran”. Andy Burnham – once a devout Blairite – has dismissed the Blair administration as a reversion to Thatcherite penance during the 40-year winter of neoliberalism. Wes Streeting, a former friend of Peter Mandelson and long regarded as the reincarnation of Blair’s revolution, now sounds more like Roy Hattersley when he criticises Blair for never using the word “inequality” in his encyclical. This is because Streeting knows that there are not enough members of the right wing of Labour to sign his candidacy papers and he desperately needs to attract some of the “softs” to get on the ballot.
There is another question that begs to be answered: What would Prime Minister Blair “2.0,” in some political fantasy world, do? I would be worried. He would abandon many campaign promises on everything from workers’ rights and the minimum wage to restoring relations with the EU and a target for environmental protection. He would cooperate with Donald Trump, as he once did with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and allow the US air force to use British bases to bomb Iran. Businesses would be given far greater freedom for artificial intelligence, and tax increases would be scrapped, likely financed by cuts to social security. Most worryingly, he made the chilling declaration that he would do “whatever it takes” to stop small boats crossing the English Channel – that he would deal with them “by whatever means necessary”. This sounds a bit like Farage; I hope it doesn’t mean ordering the Royal Navy to sink them.
This is a radical programme, no doubt, but not really “centrist.” In fact, it sounds more like a Conservative leadership bid than an attempt to return to Labour. Blair was right when he quickly observed that once his party strayed “one millimetre from New Labour,” it would be doomed; but I am not convinced that his latest manifesto is as workable or desirable as he seems to think. Such is the state of the country today that even Tony has no plan.