Tony Blair is hoping to make himself relevant by being right – but will the Labour Party listen?

The former prime minister hopes that by offering advice in public, the sheer force of his argument will win the day, says John Rentoul. As it ought to

Tony Blair: in from the cold? (Good Morning Britain )

Tony Blair always was one of the best analysts of politics. One of his party tricks as prime minister was to offer an assessment of what the Conservative opposition was doing wrong and what they ought to do to put it right.

But what he really cares about is the Labour Party, what it has been doing wrong since he ceased to lead it and what it ought to do to put it right. He kept quiet for most of the three years that Gordon Brown was prime minister, and when he did offer his views in the Ed Miliband period – traditional left versus traditional right leads to traditional result (a Labour defeat) – the party didn’t want to listen.

He was a non-person during the Jeremy Corbyn leadership, which defined itself as the equal and opposite reaction to everything he stood for, and so it is only now that he can hope to be relevant again. That he does so in a long article in the New Statesman suggests that he is not a close adviser to Keir Starmer. There are many people in the Labour Party who assume, or fear, that Starmer’s strategy is entirely dictated behind the scenes by Blair himself, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell.

This is not the case. Starmer speaks to them occasionally, as any leader (apart from Corbyn) would, but the Blairites are not controlling the operation. That is why they are forced to offer their advice in public, hoping that the sheer force of their argument will win the day. As it ought to, because it is right.

Blair’s ability to shape a political argument is unmatched by anyone who has come since, in my opinion. The most useful practical advice for Starmer in his New Statesman article is how to fight the “culture war” that Labour is currently losing to a cynical and opportunist Conservative Party. His advice is that Starmer should fight it, because at the moment the Labour leadership has left the field.

He says the Labour moderates are too worried about saying the wrong thing, so their position is: “There is no culture war; in any event we’re not playing it, or if there is and we are forced to play, we will play at the back as quietly as possible.” He says that this is a mistake, and that the party has to stand up for itself and make a virtue of “reason and moderation”.

He makes the point that if the party supports the aim of movements against racism, for trans rights or the environment, without sub-contracting its opinion to the extreme wings of those movements, people will support it.

This is a familiar theme to any student of Blair: that you achieve more by playing down the radicalism and eschewing the extremist rhetoric, while trying to rally the broadest possible public support for “progressive” causes. He cites the last Labour government’s success on gay rights and the “pathway to equal marriage”, which forced the Conservative Party to convert on the issue.

This goes with the grain of Joe Biden’s election in the US, where he ran as a moderate but governed – or at least started governing – as a radical. “A key moment for Biden was when he comprehensively disowned ‘defund the police’, while backing police reform,” says Blair. Being Blair, however, he dismisses the significance of Biden’s example. “Leave to one side Joe Biden,” he says, implying that Biden’s was a lucky win against an exceptionally poor president.

The danger, Blair suggests, is that Labour thinks that the radicalism of Biden’s programme is measured simply by the scale of public spending: “Today progressive politics has an old-fashioned economic message of Big State, tax and spend which, other than the spending part (which the right can do anyway), is not particularly attractive.”

Simply enthusing about Biden’s ambitious spending programmes, as Starmer did in his pre-elections interview last week, is not enough against an opportunist Tory government that is also promising to spend.

Instead, Blair gives Starmer a series of lines on the NHS, education and climate change that use technology to transcend the old arguments.

But his biggest challenge to Starmer is his call to deconstruct the Labour Party and reconstruct it from scratch. It is what Blair did with New Labour, and he believes it clearly needs to be done again. Again, he frames the argument ingeniously in the language of the radical left, many of whom would agree with his call for “an open dialogue between like-minded Labour and Lib Dem members and the non-aligned”. It is hard to see Starmer as the natural embodiment of such a realignment of politics, but Blair has at least given him the tools with which to start the job.