Leadership is about more than picking a fight with your party, Mr Blair

Last week Tony Blair made a major intervention that was taken – quite rightly – as an attack on Ed Miliband’s leadership. You might have missed, it but only if you’ve managed to avoid all newspapers, radio and TV for the past week. Tony is back – and he wants to have his say. As a three time election winner, no-one should begrudge him that. But if anyone thought the New Statesman piece was his only salvo, they were wrong. It was only his opening salvo. Today the Guardian reveals that Blair today a University audience in America that:

“I’ve noticed your party becomes more partisan and so your constituencies are one stripe or another and so to get the nomination you have to appeal to the party base. What I watch for in political leaders is: do you have the courage to stand up to the party base and say in the end if I’m elected I represent all the people not just the people who voted for me? If I’m elected prime minister, I’m here to represent the whole country, not just the party.”

One reading of this would be to say that of course Blair is right, a leader has to represent a much broader spectrum of public opinion than just the narrow section of society that is their political party. No-one ever won an election by pandering to a small section of political obsessives. That would be one way to read Blair’s comments, but it would be completely the wrong way to read them. It would ignore the subtext. And when reading comments as carefully constructed as Blair’s invariably are, the subtext is everything.

The key line here is “do you have the courage to stand up to the party base?” This, alas, was often the Blair credo when it came to the Labour Party. In power he sought to define himself against Labour, and against the party. If the members were outraged and a chunk of the PLP was up in arms, then Tony thought this was a sign that he was onto something. That relies on the rather unfortunate logic that if your party opposes something then it is often wrong, which doesn’t speak to any great love for the party membership who – on the whole – backed him for well over a decade.

That’s not the only way to lead though. Leadership can involve cajoling and convincing. It can involve inspiring people to back your cause. It can – and must – involve taking people with you. It can even come in the form of hard-headed iconoclasm. But it is not only defined by adopting a stance that you know your would-be supporters will disdain, followed by ramming it through against their wishes. The Labour Party was talking, during the Blair years, about soft-touch financial regulation and lack of housebuilding that now, nearly a decade down the line, have been proven to be policy failures of the last Labour government.

The Labour Party is not, Mr Blair, invariably wrong. And your way of leading was not the only way to lead.

Blair too sought to argue in his US speech that “The very fierce left-right distinctions are really a 20th-century thing”. This is a Fukoyama style “end of history” thesis, that argues Left and Right are so last century, that politics has elevated somehow to a higher plane of existence and it’s all technocracy and dead-eyed pragmatism from here on out. It’s another missive from the Davos Left. But if that’s what is happening, Tony, how do you explain this government’s crackdown on the disabled? Or the desire to squeeze the unemployed and the underemployed – coupled, of course, with the tax cut for millionaires like yourself? If this is not the politics of the Right, then what is it? Should Labour accept, perhaps, that this barbarism is in fact just pragmatism, and pledge ourselves to conduct it less heartlessly or more efficiently?

If so, that’s a depressing way to think of politics. And, for that matter, Mr Blair, society.

Update: Since posting this piece I’ve been contacted by a spokesperson for Tony Blair, who said:

“Mr Blair was responding to a question about US politics and made a general point about leadership. He certainly wasn’t referring to Ed Miliband or the Labour Party.”

I’m happy to have that on the record – and indeed the Judson University website write up of the event suggests that the debate was about Clinton/Bush relationships (although I’m sure Blair knew that his comments would be seen through the prism of Miliband’s leadership). However, the quote attributed to Blair about “The very fierce left-right distinctions are really a 20th-century thing” doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. And I still disagree with it.