Did Tony Blair ever really go away?

August 4, 2008
A very Blairite plot
Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips. 4 August 2008

Did Tony Blair ever really go away?
When David Miliband launched his not-so-coded attempt to unseat Gordon Brown with his explosive article in the Guardian last week, people wondered whether the Foreign Secretary was acting alone or was backed by other revolting Blairites.

We now have the answer to that question. Yesterday, a memo written by Tony Blair piling ordure on Brown’s premiership surfaced in the Mail on Sunday. Reportedly written just after last year’s party conferences, it has been leaked now for one reason alone: to aid David Miliband’s lunge for power.

Miliband was always the former Prime Minister’s favourite political son — the anointed heir to the Blairite dynasty.

Now, amid reports that Blair has been holding regular talks with Miliband, another of his leading acolytes, Stephen Byers, has also popped up to denounce Brown’s policies as inadequate for the challenges facing Labour.

While we don’t know who made the Blair missive available, its publication sensationally ups the stakes. This is a Blairite plot.

Revenge, it might be said, is a dish best served in a cold memorandum. It was Brown who orchestrated the destabilisation campaign against Blair which forced him out of Number Ten.

Now it’s payback time for the beleaguered Prime Minister with a dose of his own brutal medicine from the Blairites — and with the opinion polls suggesting that the Government would leap ten points if Blair were still in charge. Ouch.

But as I wrote here last week, anyone who thinks that Miliband — or any other leader, for that matter — will solve Labour’s problems must be living in la-la-land.

It’s not just that the current shenanigans bring the words ‘ferrets’ and ’sack’ strongly to mind. It’s that not only Gordon Brown but the Labour Government itself is in freefall. Voters want to be shot of the whole damn lot of them.

They also won’t forgive a party that inflicts upon them not one but two replacement Prime Ministers. But if the new leader were to call a quick election, the party would be slaughtered.

What’s more, the polls also suggest that under David Miliband, Labour would do even worse than under Gordon Brown. For what Miliband lacks is the single most important thing that won Blair three elections in a row — charisma.

The point of similarity between them, however, is that both have the disconcerting capacity to believe absolutely in their own spin, however absurd it may be.

Thus Miliband could write with a straight face that there was no social breakdown in Britain, that education standards were rising and that the NHS had been brought back from the brink.

The leaked memo, meanwhile, has graphically revealed Blair’s own monumental self-delusion. In his eagerness to blame Brown, he refuses to acknowledge his own role in the Government’s current difficulties.

He accuses Brown of junking the Blairite policy agenda. But it’s that agenda which has given us filthy hospital wards, mass illiteracy among schoolchildren and an epidemic of violent crime.

True, domestic policy was tightly controlled from the Treasury by Gordon Brown. But who allowed the Chancellor free rein to muck up the public services in this way? One T. Blair.

True, Brown undermined Blairite initiatives such as welfare reform. But Blair let him get away with it.

Throughout all the years in which the Chancellor was reportedly undermining the Prime Minister, Blair refused to sack him. Instead he was happy to share the credit for the good times, basking in the general adulation for the ‘most brilliant Chancellor in Labour’s history’.

Blair rounded on Brown in public only when the New Labour project they ran together went belly-up.

Chancellor Brown was Blair’s creation. Now the former Prime Minister is compounding his own lack of courage by turning on the man who has been able to plunge the Labour Government into today’s crisis only because Blair allowed him to reach that position.

The memo says Brown’s mistake was to ‘diss’ Blair’s record, to blame the culture of spin and proclaim a new honesty in politics. On the contrary — Brown’s terrible error was to continue Blair’s record of spin and dishonesty.

If anything did for Brown, it was this crumbling of his reputation as a rock of Caledonian moral integrity — such as breaking his manifesto promise of a referendum on the EU constitution, and then denying that it was a constitution at all.

Yes, Brown has signalled that he wants to bring home British troops from Iraq sooner than his predecessor planned. Personally, I share Blair’s concern about this. But it is absurd to believe that the electorate disapproves — or even factors it into the charge sheet against the Prime Minister.

The fact is that Iraq contributed hugely to Blair’s own political demise. The memo says ‘DC (David Cameron) was in trouble long before TB left’. Very true. But TB was also in trouble long before TB left.

Blair claims he had kept Cameron ‘confused’ by sticking to New Labour policies, whereas the Tory leader had been ‘empowered’ by Brown’s short-term tactics — such as mimicking the Tory proposal to raise the inheritance tax threshold.

But the Tory inheritance tax plan had nothing to do with Brown’s tactics. It came out of the blue at last year’s Tory conference.

It was that proposal which single-handedly transformed Tory fortunes. At that point, it dawned on the Cameroons that there were more votes in reaching out to the hard-pressed silent majority than in mimicking Blairite gesture politics.

Yet despite all this, Blair has the gall to accuse Brown of ‘hubris and vacuity’! Pots and kettles, anyone?

If, however, one stands back from this hand-to-hand fighting to take a longer view, the real problem becomes clear - - that the illusion on which the Government rested has fallen apart.

New Labour was based on a sleight of hand designed to paper over the intellectual crisis of the Left. With the fall of socialism, Left-wing ideology went out of the window. State control of the economic levers of power belonged with the dinosaurs.

The only thing that mattered — in Blair’s famous phrase — was ‘what works’. So with no one believing in anything any more, the ethic of public service was swept aside by the tricks of the trade of management consultancy.

Thus was born the target culture. Professionalism — based on independence, trust and responsibility — was superseded by armies of regulators. The red flag was replaced by red tape.

The paradox was that this explosion of bureaucracy meant even more control from the centre — imposed and policed by Chancellor Brown, who used it to further his own agenda of social engineering.

Unsurprisingly, such incoherence caused the public sector progressively to seize up altogether. It also meant that Labour had no unity of purpose. The only thing keeping it together was Blair’s genius at winning elections.

Effectively, Blair propped up Labour’s corpse and passed it off as a living entity. If the party now turns inwards upon itself — and the revolt appears to be gathering pace — those mouldy bones may finally disintegrate altogether.

It may well be that Labour cannot win the next election with Gordon Brown as leader. But if it commits regicide then, just like the Tories after they deposed Mrs Thatcher, Labour will unleash an internal war which may keep it out of power for a generation — or longer.

New Labour has turned into a bed of nails. But along with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Labour Party made it — and now it must lie on it.