The problem for Labour? Tony Blair made leading the party look easy

The party is cursed by the legacy of seemingly effortless popularity, writes John Rentoul

Blair was an exceptional leader, but he didn’t get to be prime minister for a decade just by having a big smile and an effective speaking style (PA)

Keir Starmer has a lot of people telling him what his problem is. That he served loyally in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet; that he tried to overturn the democratic decision of the British people to leave the EU; or, as a former Labour minister told me this week: “His problem is that Tony made leading the Labour Party look easy.”

It is taking the party a very long time to realise how hard it really was. The problem started with Gordon Brown, who always thought he could do a better job than his next door neighbour, and whose supporters treated the election victory of 2005 (a majority of 66 seats) as a defeat. “I could have done better,” was Brown’s coded message.

As soon as he made it into No 10, though, he discovered that it was harder than it looked. He cancelled the “presidential” police outriders for his convoy, and, as a result, turned up late at events. The outriders were quickly restored.

But the party continued to take winning elections for granted, even as it lost them. Blair had succeeded in persuading at least one group of people that Labour was the natural party of government. The party lacked the will to do what it took to win in 2010, and the trade union bosses compounded its error by choosing the wrong candidate for the next election.

It got lucky in 2017 and came close to keeping Theresa May out of No 10, but nowhere near winning in its own right. Even after 2019, the party’s worst post-war result, there was a tendency to make excuses: “Oh, that was because of Brexit.”

Now, however, there are signs that the party is finally waking up to the exceptional qualities that delivered the only sustainable parliamentary majorities it has had since the England men’s football team last won a major international competition.

A YouGov poll of Labour members this month found that more of them have a favourable opinion of Tony Blair (55 per cent) than of Jeremy Corbyn (53 per cent). More importantly, though, I think there is a growing understanding of how hard and rigorously Blair and the team around him, including Brown, worked on policy and communication. Blair was an exceptional leader, but he didn’t get to be prime minister for a decade just by having a big smile and an effective speaking style.

He spent his three years as leader of the opposition driving the Labour Party as hard as it would go, endlessly devising and refining policies until they were distilled into five bullet points on a pledge card.

When Starmer said on Thursday that he would be “sweating blood” to win back the voters’ trust, he told us how hard he knew it would be. But what the party needs to learn from Blair is “show, don’t tell”: Blair did the arduous work of preparing for government, but he made it look easy.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator