The five things Tony Blair believes could bring Labour back into power

The former prime minister held a whole-day conference to generate new ideas for, he says, anyone who wants to take them up, writes John Rentoul

Blair was explicit that Keir Starmer has not yet done enough to win (PA)

Tony Blair’s conference on the theme of the “Future of Britain” was less like the launch of a new party, and more like a re-education programme for the Labour Party. This should not have been surprising. The idea that Blair, who held back from trying to set up a new party when Jeremy Corbyn was leader, would think that it was a good idea now – now that, as he put it, “the Labour Party has recovered its basic poise” – makes no sense.

Blair was explicit, however, in the interview he gave at the end of the conference, that Keir Starmer has not yet done enough to win. Labour has “done a lot” of what it needs to do, he said, “but it’s got the chance to do more”. He praised Starmer for having “done an amazing job” in rescuing the party from the “disaster” of the Corbyn years, but everything he said about rising to the challenges facing the country made his impatience clear.

“The next election, in my view, will be as much about Labour as it is about the Conservatives,” Blair said, “because I think people will think: ‘Yeah, OK, in principle, we should put the Conservatives out.’ But before they make that change, they’ve got to be sure of Labour.”

The purpose of the conference was essentially to try to push Starmer into a more Blairite position, even though Blair claimed to be offering ideas for any party to pick up. There were Conservatives (Ruth Davidson) and former Conservatives (Rory Stewart and David Gauke) there, but they were part of a classic New Labour big tent, rather than an attempt to create a new centrist formation.

So what are Blair’s proposals to get Labour back to power?

The first thing is to say that “not everything the government does is wrong”, Blair said. One of the themes of the conference was the need to work across party boundaries to seek solutions. There was some flim-flam at the conference (mostly from Rory Stewart) about how terrible the British political system is, because of its adversarial nature and the first-past-the-post voting system, but the Blairite argument is not about electoral reform for its own sake: it is about persuading swing voters that you are reasonable and not beholden to party ideology.

The second point of Blair’s plan to make Labour ready to win an election is for it to understand the technological revolution. “This is the equivalent of the 19th-century industrial revolution,” he said, “you’ve got to learn about it and understand it.” He somewhat undermined his point by saying he had been invited to speak at an event about crypto and blockchain and asked his children for advice because they are tech-capable. Their advice was: “Say you’re sick.”

However, the conference was addressed by people who didn’t call in sick and who did know what they were talking about: about how Tesla is a battery company and a robotics company as much as a car company. There was a lot about artificial intelligence and how it is going to revolutionise health care and everything else.

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The third point is climate change. There were slick presentations about why Norway is ahead of the UK in electric vehicle sales (subsidising the sale price of cars in the showroom, rather than taxing petrol and diesel) and in praise of Elon Musk (“we need more mad entrepreneurs prepared to throw money at science” that isn’t ready yet, such as low carbon cement). Although there were also contradictory messages, with some speakers suggesting that net zero was pure gain and job creation, while others said that politicians had to face up to how difficult and expensive it would be.

The fourth is reassurance. Blair pointed to the voters of Tiverton and Honiton in Devon, who usually vote Conservative, but who voted Liberal Democrat in the by-election this month. “Those people have got to be comfortable with the idea of a Labour government,” he said. When he was leader, he said, finally relapsing into history, “I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to make that journey” – to voting Labour, or, at least, to not voting Conservative, which, from Labour’s point of view, is half as good.

Finally, Blair said: “The art of politics is to make these arguments sing.” His fifth and final point, therefore, was that the Labour Party really needs someone like him to lead it out of the trough of not-quite-good-enough in which it is stuck. In both his interviews today, one at the start and one at the end of the conference, he said that the politics of the radical centre has “a supply problem not a demand problem”. In other words, it is what people want, but there are too few talented politicians available to offer it to them.

Yet he recognises that he is not going to be called back to lead the party, so he offers Keir Starmer a beginner’s five-step programme for doing the best he can.