Blair does Blair

Good on the Labour Party, a bit weird on foreign policy

There are few risk-free investments. And even they are hedged and caveated to the point of compliance fatigue. Ever tried putting your money in gilts?¹ Merely hover your cursor over the Hargreaves Lansdown tab and you’re inundated with Financial Conduct Authority warnings that your capital is at risk and you may get less back than you invested.

And sure, this newsletter likes to have a laugh and a joke about Britain’s fiscal position. Moreover, I’m painfully aware our new overlord (and latest darling of the Labour soft-left) Andy Burnham has made a few disobliging comments about the bond market. But come on — the UK is not about to default on 2-year gilts.

In my admittedly blinkered view, there’s only one 100% guaranteed return. It is in the idea that people over the age of, say, 45, do not fundamentally change. And by my reckoning, Tony Blair turned 73 this month.

There’s always a Janan Ganesh column

I can’t find it and I’ve already lost 30 minutes of my life looking for it. But a while back, Ganesh wrote words to the effect that people should stop overthinking, Blair was simply a rock star who had his fingers on the pulse of UK public opinion on everything except foreign policy.

The year is 2026, and little has changed. In a 5,600-word essay (he really does call it an essay), Labour’s most successful leader comes closer than most to nailing the present government’s failures. Short Blair: Keir Starmer got elected with no coherent plan for a changing world. Longer Blair:

It won the 2024 election not by acclaim, but by being an acceptable (credit to Keir Starmer) default option to a Conservative government the country felt had behaved unacceptably.

However, partly because of the intellectual wasteland of the Corbyn years, it had no properly thought-through analysis of how the world was changing and what that meant for policy…

… The government’s principal problem isn’t Keir’s personality². Or a failure to communicate ‘our achievements’. Or a need to assert more strongly Labour’s ‘values’.

It is because we don’t have a worked-out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world and are in the wrong political position from which we can devise one and win a second term.

The government is governing from an essentially traditional Labour ‘soft left’ position, parked firmly in the party’s comfort zone.

But being Blair, things start to get a little weird in the foreign policy section.