Dr Blair’s prescription has made his party gag but at least it’s forced Labour to engage with ideas

When Tony Blair was at No 10, the building had a “48-hour rule”. This held that few news cycles last more than two days unless those involved feed the controversy with more fuel. So we can assume that Sir Tony, as he has since become, knows what he is doing when he stokes the blaze he ignited last week withanother intervention in today’s Observer. To those who have denigrated his initial “playing with fire” essay as out of touch and out of date, he insists that “progressive orthodoxy” will not do and only “transformative” thinking will answer the problems facing Britain and his party.

One thing we have learned from this turbulent episode is about Sir Tony himself. He had a decade in Downing Street. He recently turned 73. He is not short of a bob or two. He could be taking it easy and putting his feet up on a sunlounger. Having lambasted the party he used to lead for its “almost infinite capacity for self-delusion”, many of its members fervently wish he’d go gently into retirement. Yet he is possessed by what one old friend calls “a near-manic” desire to be at the centre of debate. Call it a lust for attention if you want to be rude; call it a yearning to remain relevant if you want to be kinder. He will say it springs from an authentic desire to help the party he once led to an unprecedented and never repeated three back-to-back election victories.

Another thing we have learned is that he has become exceedingly cross. He used to say to me, quoting advice given to him by his father, that charm was a much more potent tool of persuasion than anger. Yet the 5,700-word encyclical released by his Institute for Global Change fizzes with fury. He has often sounded disappointed about Labour, but he’s never been this brutal. He meant to wound the Starmer government when he quoted John Adams, the second president of the United States: “I totter with every breeze.” In his initial blast, and the follow-up we publish today, there’s an undercurrent of Labour’s most electorally successful leader throbbing with frustration that the party seems to have forgotten all the lessons he tried to teach it.

There’s much that reasonable people can nod along to. Labour won the last election not by acclaim but as the “default” alternative to the Tories. Sir Keir Starmer has made significant blunders since he came to power. A leadership change is “irrelevant” if Labour lacks a coherent plan and “the ability to get big things done”. Unless this country gets to grips with its fundamental challenges, “Britain will continue its long slide from the Premier League of nations”. He gets some big calls right. Nearly all our senior politicians know that the pensions triple lock is unsustainable. It persists because none of them have yet summoned the courage to act. Alan Milburn’s penetrating report into how Britain is failing its young people underscores the case for welfare reform. Sir Tony is politically unfashionable in a commendable way when he remakes the case for international aid while conceding that no focus group would approve “except perhaps one that was made up of bishops”.

While Dr Blair will carry a lot of people with much of his diagnosis, the Labour audience is gagging on his prescriptions. These include his now-familiar cry to embrace artificial intelligence. Many sneer that he’s intoxicated by the moonshine being plied from Silicon Valley, an accusation he directly confronts in the piece we publish today. He thinks we’re living through a technological revolution “not because my institute has been bought off by tech bros” but because “it’s blowing my mind in its implications”. When I last talked to him about it, I came away with the impression that he is messianic about tech because he thinks its future-facing and “modernity” has always been at the core of his political identity, and was central to his appeal when he was winning elections. His enthusiasm for tech outruns his expertise. In his most recent book, he tells a story about being booked to speak at a symposium on crypto. He rang up his eldest son for advice on what he should say. Euan replied: “Tell them you’re sick.”

His prospectus wants Labour to hug more closely to Donald Trump, ditch commitments to net zero, scrap the enhancement of workers’ rights, reduce tax and regulation on business, and do “whatever it takes” to stop small boat crossings. To use one of his own favoured phrases, it is “not serious” to imagine that the current Labour leader or any of his putative replacements are going to eat that menu. The Blair manifesto would be a dramatic shift to the right at a time when Labour is tilting to the left.

He has done some inadvertent favours to the prime minister and the men jockeying to replace him. Sir Keir’s people have been galvanised to join the war of the essays with a 3,000 word counterblast conceding to some mistakes while contending that this government is not an achievement-free zone, and pointing out, fairly enough, that the circumstances they inherited in 2024 were much bleaker than those facing Sir Tony when he came to power in 1997. He’s also provided a whetstone on which Andy Burnham can sharpen his leftwing critique. “He doesn’t mention inequality once,” says the mayor of Greater Manchester in an interview with our political editor, Rachel Sylvester. “People don’t think the centre has delivered for them in terms of their lives, therefore they’ve gone further to the extremes.”

Wes Streeting has been encumbered with the label “Blairite”, which is not helpful in winning the affections of Labour members.There was a flavour of “I know thee not, old man” to his essay rebuking Sir Tony for failing to acknowledge the impact of disparities of wealth and opportunity. “The defining issue of our age is barely confronted at all.”

It is not entirely a bad thing that Labour is engaged in a battle of ideas, though it would have been better to have waged it before the 2024 election. Sir Tony’s latest intervention suggests that he is not done with this fight. He is correct that successful political leaders must have “an attitude, a tribe and a project”, as he did at his zenith. But if he thinks that Labour is in a mood to heed his advice, he is himself a victim of self-delusion.

Photograph by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images