Give the man credit. Tony Blair has achieved a goal that even a week ago seemed impossible, and which he scarcely managed in office: he has brought the Labour party together in sweet, harmonious unity. Thanks to him, Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting and the man they hope to replace, Keir Starmer, are singing in unison, joined in a chorus of denunciation – of one T Blair.
Give the triple election-winner further credit. This is a political professional who still knows how to command the news cycle. Cannily timing the release of his nearly 6,000-word essay on the future of Britain, and the failings of Labour, to coincide with the parliamentary recess, he secured for himself massive coverage across all platforms over several days.
What’s more, the text is clear, accessible and analytically useful. There are memorable images, including the depiction of heads of government as bus drivers. When conventional leaders reach a brick wall, they stop and debate for a few hours how to get around it. The likes of Donald Trump accelerate and slam right through it: “Yes, there are bits flying off the bus … the passengers feel mildly nauseous,” writes Blair, but the US president has shown “efficacy” – and voters like it.
The temptation many succumb to when Blair makes an intervention like this is to play the man, not the ball, by holding that the single word “Iraq” disqualifies Blair from pronouncing on any subject at any time. As it happens, Iraq is relevant, but as part of a genuine response to the arguments Blair makes, not as an excuse to ignore them.
According to the former PM, “two epochal changes” are under way and Britain is not prepared for either of them. The first is geopolitical, with the world increasingly dominated by two superpowers, the US and China, with India not far behind. And yet what’s odd is that, for all the changes visible in this age of Trump – including the breakdown, if not deliberate wrecking, of the post-1945 order – Blair’s view has not shifted from the one he held with such calamitous consequences a quarter-century ago: namely, that Britain has to stick with the US, regardless of who’s in charge in Washington or where that leads.
Blair faults Starmer for refusing to give Trump the backing he sought in his war on Iran. All the White House wanted, Blair writes, was the use of British military bases for the refuelling of US planes and Starmer’s refusal was “not the best way to treat our ally”. But that account fails to acknowledge that the war has not merely been “controversial”, as Blair puts it, but an abject disaster. Even if you’re unmoved by the destruction and loss of life, look no further than the draft ceasefire extension agreement that Trump circulated this week to US allies.
If both Washington and Tehran sign, it will be confirmation that the war has achieved none of its key, if shifting, aims. It would not have ended Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but merely restarted negotiations on that topic, negotiations that were already under way, and reportedly making progress, when the US-Israeli attack began on 28 February. If anything, this war will only have fed Iran’s nuclear appetite, both by elevating the hardliners within the regime and demonstrating the value of a weapon terrifying enough to deter a future US onslaught. It has disrupted rather than destroyed Iran’s ballistic weapons capability, which is now being rapidly restored, all the while depleting the US’s own arsenal.
Above all, while failing to prevent Tehran getting its hands on a weapon of mass destruction it has handed the regime what one analyst calls a “weapon of mass disruption”, in the form of Iran’s chokehold on the world economy via the strait of Hormuz. The mooted deal will see the strait reopen to commercial shipping – which obviously counts as no achievement at all, since that was exactly where things stood on 27 February. On top of that, the Iranian regime will be much, much richer, whether by charging tolls on future Hormuz traffic or gaining access to as much as $12bn in frozen assets.
Put simply, this fiasco of a war has achieved nothing, including for the brave Iranian rebels against the regime, more than 6,000 of whom have been arrested since it began, according to Amnesty International. And yet this is the war to which Blair thinks Britain should have lent a helping hand.
It’s a reminder that Blair has not lost the blind spot that had such catastrophic consequences more than two decades ago. His great failing in 2003 was to think support for the US had to be blanket, making no distinction between one administration and another, or one military adventure and another. As Streeting put it this week: “We learned at terrible cost in Iraq what happens when loyalty replaces judgment.” We did indeed learn that lesson. But Blair, it seems, never did.
Instead, he insists that nothing much has changed in the western alliance, suggesting that the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, was wrong to speak of a “rupture”, even as Blair concedes, in the very same paragraph, that Trump had threatened Canada’s “very independence as a nation”. Similarly, he cites the Arctic as an area which the US sees “no differently” from Europe, apparently unaware that Trump has not abandoned his threats to seize Greenland by force
from Denmark, a European and Nato ally.
Blair on Europe is even more telling. He echoes Burnham in saying now is not the time to contemplate rejoining the EU, but his reasoning is revealing. His beef with Brussels is that it is too focused on “addressing the dangers rather than seizing the opportunities” of technology. Blair once had a famously good feel for British public opinion, but on this he is stunningly out of step. One of the most potent arguments for the EU is that it has the power and the will to take on the tech companies currently wreaking such havoc on our collective wellbeing, from the state of our democracies to the mental health of young people. But Blair sees that restraining hand as a problem to avoid, indeed as a reason to keep our distance from our nearest neighbours.
Which brings us to the second epochal change identified by Blair: technology, and specifically AI. “Twenty years ago it was globalisation, now it’s AI,” laments one former close colleague, noting Blair’s tendency to warn of immutable forces that cannot be challenged but which, like the weather, must simply be accepted.
Except in this case it’s hard to read Blair’s prognostications as the fruit only of dispassionate analysis. On this subject, he is not neutral. The Tony Blair Institute, or TBI, took $130m between 2021 and 2023, with pledges of a further $218m to follow, from Larry Ellison, whose Oracle company is hugely invested in AI infrastructure. According to one detailed account based on extensive testimony from current and former TBI staff, the TBI and Oracle have become “inseparable”, with the former acting as a “sales engine” for the latter. In this telling, Blair’s “trademark evangelism is now focused on AI, its power to transform government … and why everyone should listen to Larry Ellison”.
Blair’s Labour critics have focused most on the essay’s failure to mention either poverty or inequality. He would say you can only address those issues once the economy is firing. Maybe. But those are hardly his animating concerns. He is in a different realm now; he sees the world as it looks from Ellison’s boardroom or Trump’s Oval Office. Tony Blair is always worth listening to – but his voice is becoming ever more distant.
