Tony Blair’s essay on Labour failings gets full marks for being unhelpful

Did Tony Blair ever mention he was quite good at winning elections? If you happened to miss it, then his 5,700-word opus on where Labour, Keir Starmer and the UK more generally have gone wrong is here to remind you. Several times.“I led the Labour party for 13 years and through three general elections,” goes the second sentence. Further on, Blair laments that when the party tries to puzzle out how to win a second term, the one thing ruled out was “learning from the only time in the party’s 120-year history it has ever done so”.Blair’s essay, released by his eponymous thinktank, contains some slivers of praise for contemporary Labour politicians. Starmer made his party an “acceptable default” at the 2024 election. Wes Streeting is a “huge political talent”.But overall, the intervention by the former prime minister almost feels designed to inflict maximum annoyance on his party, in terms of the content of the repeated criticism and the timing, before a byelection in Makerfield that could shape Labour’s destiny for years to come.And it has already annoyed people. “He is becoming less and less relevant,” was one of the more polite responses about a man who left frontline politics nearly 20 years ago and is now mainly seen at glitzy, elite meet-and-greets such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, or hobnobbing with Donald Trump as part of his Gaza Board of Peace.This is not to say Blair is being deliberately disingenuous. The very clear tone of the essay is that of a man who worries deeply that the party he once led, plus the UK more widely, is stuck in a loop of insular political debate, not even beginning to get to grips with what he portrays as the century-defining challenge – and opportunity – of AI.The current leadership debate concerning Streeting and Andy Burnham, whom Blair also praises, “has an extraordinarily retro 20th-century feel to it”, he complains.Some in Labour might well agree, but the problem for Blair is something of a repeat offender. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change bills the essay as “his first major political intervention since Labour came to power”, which it is – if you ignore the repeated times Blair and his institute have weighed in, often unhelpfully, on areas including immigration and, most commonly, net zero.The other hurdle is that while some in the government will agree with Blair’s broad complaint that Starmer and his team have failed to come up with a coherent strategy for economic growth, the sequence of specific policy prescriptions he lists in the essay often feel politically impossible, whether among just Labour MPs or the electorate more widely.After getting into power, Blair argues, Starmer should have ditched new net zero projects, as well as laws for workers’ rights, a higher minimum wage and changes to non-dom tax status and instead “go all out for making business feel respected and supported”.Fine, some in No 10 would argue: that might or might not have helped tick up GDP growth. But it also might have meant Starmer facing a revolt from his MPs much earlier than he did.Similarly, Blair’s advice that the UK government should have backed Trump in his attacks on Iran, and the essay’s wider view that the US president is simply seeking a stronger Nato rather than undermining the alliance, reinforce the sense that this is the perspective of a person who has, in recent years, met more US presidents than British voters.For some in the government, such trenchant criticism from Labour’s most electorally successful leader will sting, even if they regard his call for a move to the “radical centre” as somewhere between vague and meaningless.“Governments which succeed don’t start with a personality contest, or a political question, as in: how do we ‘save the country’ from Reform?” Blair writes. “They start with an idea, a project, a governing purpose, an analysis of what is wrong and a plan to put it right.”Blair certainly has plans. But unlike when he had a generally sure touch as a working politician, these ones feel unlikely to be taken up.