Tony Blair lashes out at Labour

Tony Blair has unleashed a furious broadside at the competing factions in the party he used to lead. He says it's “playing with fire” in the leadership contest it expects to hold this summer, and failing to meet two epochal challenges posed by AI and looming geopolitical irrelevance. Labour’s problem is not its leader but the lack of a “coherent plan”, he writes in a 5,600-word essay released last night. His solution is a grand rethink and a “radical centrist” agenda that scraps the triple lock on the state pension, lets oil and gas firms back into the North Sea and reorganises the entire government around AI. Forcing members to choose between Andy Burnham – assuming he wins next month’s Makerfield byelection – and, say, Wes Streeting before crafting a policy-led strategy is “not a serious way of conducting ourselves”, he writes. His tone verges on scornful. In paragraph 2 of 145 he reminds readers of his three general elections wins atop a party “largely of decent, well-meaning people” which is also, he regrets to add, a party with “an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion”.