This is Tony Blair’s advice for Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer

The former prime minister and the head of his delivery unit, Sir Michael Barber, discuss what both Labour and the Conservatives can learn from them, as John Rentoul listens in

Tony Blair, the former prime minister, on the ‘science’ of governing (PA)

We had Tony Blair in our (virtual) seminar on Thursday at King’s College London. He was there to discuss Sir Michael Barber’s new book, Accomplishment: How to Achieve Ambitious and Challenging Things.

It was a fortuitously timed event, because Boris Johnson had announced the re-formation of the Number 10 Delivery Unit the previous day. Sir Michael was head of Blair’s delivery unit in 2001-05, and he has been drafted into Downing Street to advise the current government on how to deliver its ambitious plans for levelling up, net zero and better public services.

His advice was to set up a new delivery unit, and last week it was announced that it will be headed by NHS CCO Emily Lawson, when she has seen through her work running the vaccination programme. I understand that Boris Johnson says that, having criticised the “targets culture” as a journalist in the Blair years, he is now a “complete convert” to the idea of setting targets and having a unit to track progress towards them.

“One of the reasons Michael and I do what we do today,” said Blair, talking about his work advising governments around the world, “is because there is a science to governing. The skillset that brings you to power – the skills of persuasion – is not the skillset of government – the skills of executive capability.”

I asked if it was significant that the new unit was called the Number 10 Delivery Unit rather than the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, as it had been in Blair and Sir Michael’s day, because I remember Sir Michael saying how important it was that the unit was seen to have the prime minister’s personal authority.

Sir Michael told the event, organised by the Strand Group at King’s, that Johnson is “absolutely focused” on the unit and “explicitly wanting to learn from the delivery unit that Tony and I have been talking about and then obviously adapt it to 20 years later – and it will need his attention all the way through to do the big, ambitious agenda that he’s setting for the country as we come out of the pandemic”.

He added: “You wouldn’t really want to call it exactly the same thing as something 20 years ago. But it’s in No 10; and it’s got the support of the cabinet secretary as well as the prime minister.”

He and Blair are obviously proud that Johnson sees their partnership as a model for how to drive change in government, and point out that many of the objectives set by the current prime minister are things that they support. But Blair thought that the “science” of delivery also contains lessons for Keir Starmer. “We have talked a lot about government,” he said. “These are also important things for the opposition to reflect upon as it prepares hopefully to be a government.”

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator