Why was Tony Blair reluctant to condemn texts between Boris Johnson and James Dyson?

Sean O’Grady considers why, given a golden opportunity to criticise the government about the latest ‘sleaze’ allegations, Blair decided not to take it

Blair might well have thought better of being accused of hypocrisy, as a prime minister who was himself notably friendly to powerful business interests (PA)

When offered the opportunity by Justin Webb on BBC’s Today programme to condemn James Dyson’s text to Boris Johnson, Tony Blair, who is after all still a member of the Labour Party, declined to bash his successor. In contrast to the indignation displayed by Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs about the “jaw-dropping” revelations, Blair was at his most laidback: “We're in the middle of a pandemic and, after all, we were actually asking James Dyson to step forward and start making ventilators ... I find it hard to get worked up about this."

He added: "There's got to be a certain degree of understanding. If you're in the middle of a huge crisis like this, people are going to be using every means they can to make sure they respond to the immediate crisis."

Of course, Blair was displaying once again his “man of the world” credentials, injecting a little realism into the public debate, in contrast to the lofty purism of the Corbyn era, and, to a lesser extent, the current regime. He took the same sort of line about the accusations of impropriety levelled at David Cameron over his lobbying Rishi Sunak and Matt Hancock: “What's necessary is that the decision-making process is done in an objective way. By and large, in our system I think it is. We've got to be careful of overstating the problems in our own system ... the British system is a pretty clean system."

There is a faint echo there of his famous claim in 1997 that people thought him “a pretty straight kind of guy”. The word “sleaze” never crosses his lips, or at least not since he was using it to flay John Major’s moribund administration. Blair was and is happy to talk to Rupert Murdoch, dodgy dictators and any kind of business leaders. He would have had no problem, you’d suspect, in responding directly to a point or request made by a figure such as Dyson...

Or, indeed, Bernie Ecclestone, the former boss of Formula 1, whose relationship with New Labour was to cause acute embarrassment in the early months of Blair’s premiership in 1997. It was, at the time, called “sleaze”, and questions about the Ecclestone affair have never quite gone away. From documents that have emerged since, it would indeed seem to be the case that Blair was moved within hours of a meeting with Ecclestone to ask his sports minister, Tessa Jowell, to investigate offering sport, and specifically Formula 1, a derogation for a forthcoming EU directive banning tobacco sponsorship in sport. Ecclestone had previously switched his financial support from the Conservatives and donated £1m to help New Labour win the 1997 election. Another gift of £1m was under discussion, but eventually vetoed by the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Blair didn’t have a mobile phone at the time, which was probably as well. Personal phone lines, social media and email accounts should probably be used purely for family and personal matters (as Hillary Clinton and Michael Gove might agree).

So Blair might well have thought better of being accused of hypocrisy, as a prime minister who was himself notably friendly to powerful business interests, and instead adopts the position that ministers and even prime ministers don’t put the phone down on the likes of Ecclestone or Dyson. It is also the case that, as a former prime minister, he has to ration his outbursts and retain some sort of influence. Blair’s Institute for Global Change has done a good deal of innovative thinking on the covid pandemic, notably pushing for the “single jab” rapid mass vaccination strategy. He would not wish to dissipate whatever influence he might still have with a gratuitous attack on Johnson, and a disingenuous one at that. Blair, now elder statesman, is smarter than that; were he still leader of the opposition, though, he might be less understanding.