Say what you like about Tony Blair, he knows how to analyse politics

The former prime minister said more in a short speech last week than most frontline politicians manage in a year, according to John Rentoul

Tony Blair still has the most distinctive hand gestures in British politics (Getty)

I don’t like to go on about it, so you may not be aware that I tend to the view that Tony Blair was, on balance, a good prime minister. Occasionally, however, his name slips out, such as on Friday when I posted on Twitter the first paragraph of a speech he delivered at Chatham House. 

It was part of my public service remit, I thought. People ought at least to know he was making a speech. Anyway, it went viral, mainly I think because its clarity about Brexit contrasted with Keir Starmer’s recent obfuscation. 

This is what Blair said: “I campaigned so long and so passionately against Brexit because I believed it to be a strategic error, not just of policy but of destiny. I haven’t changed my mind about its wisdom. But reality is reality. We have done it. We must live with it. We should make the best of it. And … if a return to Europe is ever to be undertaken by a new generation, Britain should do it as a successful nation Europe is anxious to embrace, not as a supplicant with no other options.”

There were two kinds of grumpy responses among the many positive ones. There was the usual “but Iraq”; and there was also: “But that is exactly what Starmer has been saying.” It isn’t, though, because Starmer is engaged in live electoral combat. As leader of the opposition he cannot say that Brexit was a mistake, and certainly not a “strategic error”. Still less can he suggest that Britain might eventually want to rejoin the EU. 

If Blair were in Starmer’s position, he would be saying roughly what Starmer is saying, possibly a bit more eloquently, and no doubt complaining privately about former prime ministers sticking their oar in. 

Yet the thing about former prime ministers – or at least about this former prime minister – is that they are good at assessing the state of British politics. The most interesting part of Blair’s short speech was its conclusion, in which he summed up the tensions within both main parties. 

The Brexit coalition that won the election for the Conservatives, he said, “consists of some who see Brexit as the facilitator of a new, reforming, global Britain, and others, notably in the old Labour seats of the north, who see Brexit as allowing us to return to the nation ‘we once were’”. 

Equally, Labour is divided between a “modernising wing” which believes in “radical change” (a nice touch, that), and the “old, small ‘c’ conservative left which believes that the solutions lie in the return to traditional institutions of collective and state power”. 

In both cases, he suggested, the contradictions can be resolved if the parties treat Brexit as “a catalyst for change, which is necessary even without Brexit and could have been done without doing Brexit, but which, by the challenge it poses, Brexit somehow enables”.

As a political commentator, even while he was prime minister, Blair always was unrivalled. 

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator