Tony Blair is back in Britain to promote the paperback edition of his 2010 memoir, A Journey. The permatanned ex-premier has been doing the rounds of the television and radio studios, offering his views on the Arab Spring as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s guest-edit of the New Statesman.
He also offered this piece of advice to Ed Miliband, the current Labour leader. From the Times (£):
What he will say is that a progressive party will never win unless it shows that is “in favour of the business community, in favour of entrepreneurs, of enterprise”.
Wise words, I guess, from a man who is making millions from his various corporate gigs. But why should Miliband or any other Labour politician heed his advice? The media, and the Cameroons, are still in awe of the former premier. But here are three points worth briefly considering before taking any political advice from Tony Blair in 2011:
1) On Blair’s watch, Labour lost four million votes between 1997 and 2005. Lest we forget, in the 2005 general election, Blair was re-elected with a vote share of 35 per cent — that’s less than the majority-less Cameron achieved in 2010. Blair won in 2005 because his opponent was Michael Howard.
2) When Blair left office in the summer of 2007, his personal poll ratings were falling — and so, too, were the Labour Party’s. As the authors of the new book, Explaining Cameron’s Coalition, argue, “Blair’s ratings were falling from 1997 and that, even if Labour had not changed leader, it is likely that Blair’s would have been as low as Brown’s were by 2010.”
3) Blair invaded Iraq. Regardless of whether you think it was right or wrong to topple Saddam Hussein, politically, the war was a massive misjudgement on Blair’s part. It split his party and the country, cost him his political capital, wrecked his reputation and undermined any legacy he might have hoped to leave behind as a three-time election winner. As the former Lib Dem leader Menzies Campbell once put it, “Mary Tudor had Calais engraved on her heart. Blair will have Iraq engraved on his heart and there is no escaping it.”
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