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."