If you’re wondering what Tony Blair is up to, the answer may lie with Keir Starmer

Starmer needs to make a big policy offer soon if he is to stop Blair’s private fears becoming reality, writes Andrew Grice

The private concern in Labour’s high command is that Blair’s move sends a signal that he doesn’t think Keir Starmer can win power (PA)

“What on earth is Tony Blair up to?” one member of the shadow cabinet asked me. Labour figures wonder whether, despite his insistence he is not launching a new party, Blair’s new drive for a “radical but sensible strong centre” is a precursor to a movement like Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche. They wonder whether it is a genuine attempt to put flesh on Labour’s bare policy bones or a vanity project for a 69-year-old politician still fizzing with energy and ideas.

On the face of it, a relatively inexperienced Labour top team could do with his advice. Blair told his Future of Britain ideas conference in London yesterday it was “really shocking” how much he had learnt since leaving office in 2007.

Politics “is the only business in the world in which you take a really, really important position and you give it to someone with no qualifications,” he said.

“What I found when I became prime minister is that all those qualities that may have made you come to power, which are about being a persuader and a communicator… you suddenly realise it is all about delivery, executive capability and understanding.” (An awful lot of Tory MPs would agree with that as they agonise over Boris Johnson’s future.)

The private concern in Labour’s high command is that Blair’s move sends a signal that he doesn’t think Keir Starmer can win power. Blair told his conference Starmer was doing “an amazing job”, conceding he had a more difficult job than when Blair became Labour leader in 1994, because modernising spadework had already been done by his predecessors Neil Kinnock and John Smith. (At the time, as I remember well, he didn’t think Smith went far enough.)

But Blair issued a coded warning that Starmer could not rely on the Liberal Democrats giving him a leg up to power by capturing Tory seats. At a general election, rather than by-elections, he said people would not vote Lib Dem to get the Tories out unless they felt “comfortable with the idea of a Labour government”. (Clearly, they didn’t under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.)

Although yesterday’s launch had been planned since January, the timing raised Labour eyebrows because Starmer passed the test of last week’s Wakefield by-election. Suspicions remain that Blair’s call for a “new politics” will one day become one for a new party. Critics point to his think tank’s statement that “thinking along the traditional 20th-century left-right divide is outdated and a distraction from creating a compelling vision and strategic plan for the future”.

Indeed, not all of Blair’s traditional fan club back his new project, fearing it might undermine Starmer. Although Peter Kyle, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, was on the platform yesterday, some shadow cabinet members stayed away.

Another notable absentee, Blair’s close ally Peter Mandelson, told me: “For Tony, in my view, the conference was not about reheating the policies of the past but recreating the spirit and ambition of New Labour in the 1990s. It is important to create space for a new generation to develop their ideas and to recognise that, realistically, we have to look to the existing main parties as the vehicles for political change in Britain.”

Some Labour MPs suspect Blair has got too close for his own good to billionaire tech bosses. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle and a big funder of the Tony Blair Institute, was interviewed online at the conference. He is a known Donald Trump supporter and has donated $15m (£12.5m) to a campaign for Republican senator Tim Scott, a possible running mate if Trump tries to regain the presidency in 2024.

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At one point, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, looked set to fund Blair’s new project – until he came out as a Republican supporter. Some funny friends, perhaps, given Blair’s desire to offer an alternative to populism on the right and left, which he says “exploits grievances”. Blair critics noted that yesterday’s session on the tech revolution did not cover workers’ rights, even though insecurity at work offers Labour a good dividing line against the Tories. They have unwisely ceded this ground to the opposition; the Employment Bill to ensure fairness at work they have repeatedly promised has never materialised and they would rather bang on about “Labour strikes”.

Blair is right about one thing: Starmer urgently needs a policy offer to show voters what he and Labour stand for. To the alarm of the left, Starmer admits he is starting with a blank page, saying “the slate is wiped clean,” rather than the left-of-centre ticket on which he was elected leader.

Even Starmer’s shadow cabinet allies admit privately “the cupboard is pretty bare” on economic policy now the government has stolen Labour’s windfall tax on oil and gas companies.

Although Labour aides promise that more policies will be unveiled at the party conference in September, there’s a danger of raising expectations for the event that will not be fulfilled. Starmer needs to make a big policy offer soon if he is to stop Blair’s private fears becoming reality.