Now half term is over, let’s have a quick quiz. Reading these lines, can you spot the common theme? Westminster has been mesmerised this week by the messages of a famous Blairite, Peter Mandelson, especially his damning exchanges with fellow carrier of the Blair torch, Pat McFadden. Last week’s big news was an essay written by Tony Blair himself. That was followed by a report
on youth unemployment written by Blair’s former secretary of health, Alan Milburn. The story of this summer is shaping up to be a battle for the Labour leadership between Andy Burnham, whom Blair called “an outstanding member of my government”, and Wes Streeting, who is an outstanding member of his fanclub.
Catch it? That’s right: were little green men to visit Britain, they would think it under the control of some guy called Tony Blair. If not chief executive of these islands, he’s certainly the chair. If it’s not him in the spotlight, some other back number from the class of ’97 is hastily pressed into service. Just taken a massive tonking in the local elections? Better call Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown into No 10 for the photos.
On it goes, through Jonathan Powell, Michael Barber, Liz Lloyd, Tim Allan. Need a walking contacts book to charm Donald Trump? Let’s call Peter … Oh dear.
On Blair’s latest encyclical, I’ll spare you my thoughts. You’ve had more than enough from everyone else, which is part of the point. For this column, the Guardian’s research department went through the national newspapers published early last week and found a quite startling fact: Tony Blair landed three times the coverage of Yvette Cooper and Shabana Mahmood put together.
A man who left power almost two decades ago makes more headlines than the serving home and foreign secretaries. He does the big interviews, attracts so many responses and sets the terms of the debate. Why?
Despite what some papers might pretend, Tony Blair is not an inscrutable enigma, the Garbo of SW1 who has broken his silence to make an “extraordinary intervention”. In the past two years alone, he has delighted us with his opinions on Iran (we should have gone in with Trump), digital ID (loves it), net zero (hates it), along with other hobby horses. The man does more encores than Bruce Springsteen.
He’s not doing this to slake the appetite of an otherwise insatiable public. In one recent poll, respondents judged Blair less worth listening to than Boris Johnson. No, his sole audience, the sole group of people who consider his counsel valuable, is the political and media classes.
More years lie between us and New Labour taking office than between New Labour and Harold Wilson. But could you imagine Blair making Barbara Castle his wages tsar? Bringing in Joe Haines to do a bit of comms? The thought would have been laughable; today it is a badge of seriousness.
Centuries after the sack of the Roman empire, during the Anglo-Saxon dark ages, there was a poem called The Ruin that described the remains of an ancient city – believed by scholars to be Bath – as if it was the work of an extinct race of superhumans. Civilisation had peaked long ago; the present was only a coda.
There is the best analogy I can make for Starmer’s combination of diffidence and ancestor worship. Those ancients were giants; we are Lilliputians. They were winners; we are losers who got lucky. They had ideas; we have a photocopier.
Some blame for this can be heaped on the apparatchiks around Starmer who, with his assent, purged any independent thinker they could find within the party. Whatever the explanation, to treat the Blairites as possessing timeless wisdom is a misreading of both past and present. Even if you leave aside the bloody debacles of Afghanistan and Iraq, Blair is the prime minister who oversaw the loss of a million manufacturing jobs, a huge fall in council housing, and a historic financial bubble. What Bryan Gould said of Mandelson applies in spades to the main guy: “He was always disappointing as someone who is said to be a visionary for the Labour party. He had a vision for how Labour could win an election, but not too much idea for how to change society.”
Blair left No 10 in June 2007, just as the credit crunch began. Within a few months, Britain had a banking run followed the next year by the biggest financial collapse in our history. At that point, every plausible justification for the Blair project – let finance rip to pay for public sector jobs and lean into the knowledge economy – was blown to bits. That was the point for a total rethink of both the UK’s political economy and the purpose of the Labour party. Judge for yourself how far either argument has advanced in the two decades since. The big test for Burnham this summer will be to show how far his ideas have moved on since he was a junior minister to Blair.
Certainly among the Blairites themselves there is no reflection or rethinking. Just look at the exchanges revealed this week between Mandelson and McFadden, which read like the dialogue of Vladimir and Estragon, only without the punchlines.
McFadden suggested that Labour MPs ask only one question: “Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?” There is some sense in that, which is why I and others have expressed irritation at an economic policy that seems basically to go “something something wealth tax”. That is still preferable to the Blairites own economics, which is “whose benefits can we take away, in order to cut taxes for others?”
“How do we fight Reform?” McFadden now beseeches Mandelson. “And what do we give people to rally round?”
“You rally people round winning for Britain,” replies Mandelson. This is neither policy, nor politics. It’s the kind of pitch made by admen after a three-bottle lunch. Elsewhere the guru urges Starmer’s team “to embrace Knowledge and Risk on everything that will help grow the economy. There is a large appetite for UK investment in the US – I have met the CEOs of [the fund managers] Blackstone and Bridgewater.” This is the same thinking that gave us the banking crisis – it’s the only thinking Mandelson has.
More fool the people who treat him as a sage. But then what a sad, backward-looking government this is: led by a man with the political nous of Rishi Sunak, still scared of the ghost of Liz Truss, and strangest of all beholden to Blairites, who themselves lived in the shadow of Margaret Thatcher.
