Will Sir Tony and Sir Keir unite to run Britain?

For more than a month now the main Labour story has been about the return of Sir Tony Blair as Sir Keir Starmer’s unofficial chief adviser. The former PM is using his Global Institute to produce new policy to fill in the many holes in Labour’s current offer.

Starting with a major Politico feature a month ago, under the headline “Tony Blair’s Labour rehabilitation continues as he shares stage with Keir Starmer”, nearly every political journalist has written the same story for the Daily Mail, the Guardian, The Times or Unherd.

Only the Sunday Times has tried to rain on the Two Knights’ bromance, with a report that the Blair Global Institute took money from Saudi Arabia. These payments have continued since 2018, when Saudi agents persuaded the dissident journalist Jamal Kashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post, to enter the Kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul, where he was chopped up and his dismembered body taken away in a suitcase.

But with Saudi Arabia now presenting itself as Israel’s best friend in the Middle East and hosting a new football league to rival Europe’s bloated self-important football establishment, the unhappy end of the journalist now fades into history.

Could Sir Tony be fully rehabilitated within Labour, or the wider UK political community, or that he will be a latter-day Cardinal Mazarin, gliding softly in and out of Downing Street if Sir Keir becomes Prime Minister? The idea should be treated with caution.

Blair remains a legendary figure for Labour and rightly so. He won three elections and gave Labour its longest-ever period in government. He inherited a country so broken that its poorer regions, like South Yorkshire, Wales or the North-East, became eligible for charity handouts of hundreds of million from the European Union. As the Spectator reported recently, if the UK were an American state it would be the second poorest in the US after Mississippi. The extraordinary take-off of London in the 1980s and the necessary employment law reforms after the 1970s public sector strikes (now back under Rishi Sunak) have hidden the fact that the Thatcher years left huge swathes of Britain much weaker.

Blair in 1997 came in with a reforming zeal last seen in the great Asquith-Lloyd George administration of 1906. Anti-gay laws and hereditary peers in the Lords were swept away. The Bank of England was given its independence and a Department of International Development set up to tackle the global poverty that drives migrants to enter Europe, and ultimately Britain, illegally.

In response to rising crime, New Labour recruited 20,000 extra police. Blair took on wokeism avant la lettre with Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. He tried to pass a law bringing in ID cards which the Guardian and the LibDems hated but was appreciated in Red Wall seats. They were unhappy about the arrival of a new wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe whom no-one seemed to have counted or planned for. For the first time there was proper investment in the NHS. The middle and upper classes were made to pay a modest contribution to their children’s university education in the form of tuition fees.

But all the good reforms linked to Blair were utterly overshadowed by the Iraq War. Little matter that 413 MPs voted for it, including all future Prime Ministers up to Liz Truss, or that William Hague too told the Commons that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Nor did it matter that Blair had shown in Kosovo how military intervention could end the genocidal slaughter of Serb death squads organised by Slobodan Milosevic, who had been appeased in Bosnia by John Major’s Tory administration.

Intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan ended Saddam’s and Taliban tyranny for a brief period. But it created failed states in their place, which opened the floodgates to the mass arrival of asylum seekers and economic migrants, which has convulsed Europe in the last decade.

Labour will never forgive Blair for Iraq. Most of his ministers agree it was a mistake to follow Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. There are few American officials of the era who now defend Iraq. But Blair cannot bring himself to say he was wrong and offer a mea culpa.

He has poured the millions he makes on the  speechifying circuit of billionaire business bosses into his Global Institute.  It has produced reports and organises conferences, often of higher quality than the longstanding international think-tanks in London, such as Chatham House.

Ed Miliband made a big mistake as Labour leader 2010-15 in trashing every achievement of the Blair years. The changes that Blair’s team achieved for the good of Britain after 1997 have been forgotten, as no-one defends them and everyone focuses on Iraq.

Perhaps with the passage of time a new generation of Labour MPs and future ministers will rediscover Blair. It is a tribute to Sir Keir Starmer’s good sense that he is seen in Sir Tony’s company at a high level. The Labour leader’s decision to honour the man who achieved so much for his party is blazing a trail for his colleagues.

But the Global Institute is part of the Davos culture of deracinated politics. It operates at cloudy levels of post-national politics, rarely able to offer solutions to the day-to-day problems leaders in all democracies have to find answers to.

A British prime minister wakes up each morning to dozens of big and small problems to solve, words to find, decisions about media handling or appointments, foreign leaders on the phone wanting a word. Blair knows this better than anyone. It’s a fantasy to suppose he can stroll into Downing Street and tell a future Prime Minister Starmer what to do. Even more so to imagine that Sir Tony and Sir Keir could combine to run Britain.

Advice, yes; but little and not often. If the polls confirm Sir Keir Starmer as our next PM, he will be the most solitary politician in Britain. The buck will stop on his desk and no previous PM will be of much help.

Denis MacShane served as a minister under Tony Blair.

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