Tony Blair’s downfall is complete – what a sad, irrelevant end
What a pointless and dispiriting intervention. What a sad move by the most talented politician of his generation.
Tony Blair seized the political agenda today with a claim for the future of centrist politics. But he did not sound like Emmanuel Macron or Anthony Giddens. More than anyone, he sounded like Jeremy Corbyn: a man out of time. A relic of the old world with no relevance to the new.
He still remembered how to command the agenda. He released his 5,700-word essay to lobby journalists on Tuesday under embargo, then published it just in time for the print deadline and the News at 10, ensuring maximum publicity. He followed up with the morning radio news programmes.
Peppered throughout the piece were those tell-tale bits of Blair eloquence, like his warning that Britain is on a “long slide towards relegation from the Premier League of nations”. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s good effortless political communication of the sort we rarely see anymore. Other leaders would frame a whole election campaign around slogans Blair issues as an aside.
At the heart of his piece there was a truth. The current Labour Government lacks the basic ideas to give it meaning. Good governments, he said, “start with an idea, a project, a governing purpose, an analysis of what is wrong and a plan to put it right”. He is absolutely correct. They do and Labour does not have it, nor even really seem that interested in it.
The problem is not Blair’s diagnosis. It is the prescription. His ideas are either vacuous, or commercially suspect, or irrelevant to the modern period.
On vast areas of policy, his suggestion effectively amounts to: make it work please. Fix welfare, stop the boats, establish growth, improve healthcare. How? Who knows. It is apparently enough to simply say it. He seems to think that the main obstacle to accomplishing these goals is that people have not realised they want to do so, rather than because they are difficult.
Even the things he believes in were expressed with a kind of breathless naivety. A great many words in the article concern the inevitability of AI, which he seemingly wants to proceed without any regulation at all. But it is precisely because AI brings opportunities and threats that it must be grappled through policy: encouraging what is good, discouraging what is bad, working to reskill those who lose their jobs because of it, thinking ahead to the kind of jobs that will be created or given new life by it. Just standing aside and saying how marvellous it all is is not a strategy.
Most of Blair’s recommendations align cosily with his commercial interests. Oracle boss Larry Ellison’s foundation has donated tens of millions to the Tony Blair Institute. His company has invested heavily in AI. Blair now advances Ellison’s view on AI, particularly on the use of health care data. The Tony Blair Institute works with fossil fuel companies and oil states, recently signing a multimillion-pound deal to advise the Saudi government. Blair now campaigns against net zero, the most successful area of Labour Government policy delivery with broad support across the country.
But Blair’s true failure is in his inability to accommodate himself to the modern world. He is exactly the same as the old trade unionists he once replaced in the Labour Party. He has made precisely the same series of psychological errors.
Politics has changed underneath his feet. Everything has altered at speed. It is disorientating for all of us. But some people have changed their prior assumptions on the basis of that change and some people have proved unable.
We all know Blair’s starting assumption when it comes to the transatlantic relationship: you stay close to the Americans. You do your best to influence them where possible, but you do not allow yourself to be divided. This view – it is actually more of a faith at this point – has discoloured his assessment of the Trump administration to the point of caricature.
“This side of the water, we’re being told some home truths,” Blair argues. The Americans want us to be “bigger and better partners”, not to distance themselves from us. They are still our allies. Trump, due to his concern about Russia in the Arctic, sees the world “no differently from how Europe sees the world”.
Every part of this assessment is wrong. Trump does not speak “home truths”. He lies. Trump does not want us strong. He wants us weak. He views the world in terms of personal fiefdoms and would prefer the UK as a minor subordinate in the American sphere of interest. Trump does not see the world as Europe does. He is an ally of Russia. He wishes to destroy Europe.
All of this is so obvious it barely needs saying. The Trump administration openly supports European political parties trying to undermine the EU from within. It repeatedly sympathises with Russia’s war aims in Ukraine and has tried to help it secure them in peace talks. It has threatened to invade a Nato ally. The level of wilful blindness you need to believe otherwise is astonishing.
It is the kind of blindness which can only be attained through ideology. Blair would reject this, of course. He insists he is still part of the “radical centre”, where “you put policy first and politics last”. But, in fact, he is just like the zealots he once deposed. No matter what happens in the objective world, no matter how irrefutable the evidence against him, he will continue on regardless, because he has built an ideological blast shield around his mind.
It’s a sad, ignoble end to a great political mind. No matter what we might think of Iraq, Blair had a remarkable record in government, with real delivery across a suite of policy areas: health, education, homelessness, transport, science, youth unemployment, skills, Europe, Kosovo. There is an alternate timeline in which he proved a very useful former prime minister, offering judicious and well-timed advice on how to govern well.
