Yes, Tony Blair has touched a nerve – but should he really return to public life?

I have to say there’s been a startling, if fanciful, amount of chatter out there in recent days about bringing back Tony Blair as prime minister. The tremendous fuss about his 5,000-plus-word essay outlining the mess the country and Labour are in attracted an astonishing amount of attention for someone who’s been almost 20 years out of power.

It was genuinely unexpected and unprecedented in its scorn for his successor, exceeded only by Ted Heath’s vengeful “Incredible Sulk” cold war with Margaret Thatcher. At least Heath had a genuine grudge, given that she’d usurped him, and there was a chasm between them on fundamentals, not least on Europe. Blair has no such excuse. Keir Starmer, we may recall, was widely assumed to be the nearest thing to a Blairite the party had come even close to installing since the real thing was eased out by Gordon Brown, and Blair seemingly had few serious differences with his eventual successor.

Even now, Blair manages to give some parenthetical credit to Starmer for rebuilding the party after the Corbyn era – albeit only to the point where it was an “acceptable” and “default” alternative to the doomed and discredited Tories. (Starmer seems too polite to point out that the defeat of John Major in 1997 was surely equally inevitable.) Anyway, the pair reportedly don’t get on very well, despite, or possibly because, they are both progressive north London lawyers.

I’m not sure what a “just for fun” public opinion poll that pitted Sir Tony against Sir Keir might yield. Still, I suspect that the findings wouldn’t be a source of comfort for the present beleaguered occupant of No 10 – even if that occupant is still there, against all the odds, defiant as the “pointless plastic bollard” Boris Johnson called him. And this is some weeks after Starmer had been openly attacked by his own MPs and been abandoned for dead in media circles.

Some of my colleagues with a misplaced sense of history gleefully point out that while Blair is 73, he is sprightly with it, and Winston Churchill was about the same vintage when he steered Britain through its darkest hour in 1940.

In a new YouGov poll taken in the aftermath of Blair’s “Playing with Fire” essay, the question “Do you think Keir Starmer or Tony Blair would make the better prime minister today?” gave Blair a two-point lead over the incumbent. Cometh the time, cometh the man.

Or maybe not. The critical point here, made for the purposes of illuminating the state of the Labour Party rather than as a practical proposition, is that Blair – or, more to the point, anyone like him – cannot be elected as leader.

As the old joke goes, Blair did so much for Labour that they don’t know how to forgive him. He won three general elections, transformed the nation for the better, socially and economically, crushed the Tories and delivered a decade of uninterrupted steady 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 is only one reason why Labour activists hate the guy.

Like Blair himself, I rather feel as though Labour people don’t like the agnostic way he did politics. They prefer to be pure and lose than be compromised and win. As Blair himself put it in his long disquisition, “The government is governing from an essentially traditional Labour 'soft left’ position, parked firmly in the party’s comfort zone”. As he also frequently observed with a baleful sigh during the barren 1980s, “Labour loves a loser”.

New Labour, in other words, was essentially an aberration, and accepted by the membership after it had received four successive punishment beatings 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 inherently a party of stubborn, slow learners who will only meet the electorate halfway when no other option remains. It was to happen again after the loss in 2010 – 2015 (under the archetypally soft-left Ed Miliband), 2017 (though more narrowly with a proper socialist running things) and 2019 (a rout) followed. Only then would they turn to the centre, and Starmer had to make some cynical promises to beat Rebecca Long-Bailey convincingly in 2020.

The Blairite ascendancy in Labour was, despite appearances, neither complete nor permanent. The pitiful size of the Blairite tendency can be precisely measured at around 4 per cent, that being the vote share that Liz Kendall achieved in the 2015 leadership contest, and the score Wes Streeting had in the last survey of Labour members. Blair’s dream that New Labour would be the fulcrum, the “radical centre” for a realignment of the British party system, didn’t long survive Blair’s departure. As the raspberry mist his former comrades have given his essay reminds us, he and his ideas are as resented as ever.

His old party is as unkind to him as he is to them, and, for reasons far more visceral than Iraq, there will not be a reconciliation. Starmer, in his response to Blair on his prime ministerial Substack, was icily polite but said “clearly, we have a very different view about the conflict in Iran” among other things.

Andy Burnham – once a devout Blairite – has dismissed the Blair administration as a regrettable Thatcherite aberration during the 40-year winter of neoliberalism. Wes Streeting, former friend of Peter Mandelson and long thought to be the reincarnation of the Blair revolution, now sounds more like Roy Hattersley when he condemns Blair for failing to use the word “inequality” once in his encyclical. That is because Streeting knows that there aren’t enough members of the Labour right wing to sign his nomination papers, and he desperately needs to peel off a few of the “softies” to get onto the ballot paper.

There’s one other question that begs an answer: What, in some world of fantasy politics, would Prime Minister Blair “2.0” do?

I’d be worried. He’d scrap multiple manifesto promises on everything from workers’ rights and the minimum wage to the EU reset and net zero. He’d work with Donald Trump, just as he did before with Bill Clinton and George W Bush, and let the US air force use British bases to bomb Iran.

Business would be permitted much more freedom on AI, and tax raises would be reversed, presumably paid for by cutting social security. Most concerning, he issued the chilling statement that he’d do “whatever it takes” to stop the small boats crossing the English Channel – deal with them “with whatever means”.

That sounds a bit Faragey; I hope he doesn’t mean ordering the Royal Navy to sink them.

That’s a radical agenda, alright, but not really “centre”. In fact, it sounds more like a leadership bid for the Conservative Party than an attempt at a Labour comeback.

Blair was soon enough proved right when he observed that as soon as his party departed “one millimetre from New Labour” it would be doomed; but I’m not convinced that his latest manifesto would be as practicable or desirable as he seems to assume. Such is the state of the nation today that even Tony hasn’t got a plan.