Tony Blair Is a Demon the British Left Needs to Exorcize
Tony Blair’s capacity for malevolence appears to be without limit. Blair’s latest intervention in British politics is yet another bid to make the world an uglier, nastier place, brought to you in association with his tech billionaire sponsors.
Tony Blair’s latest intervention in British politics takes the form of a rambling diatribe that purports to offer counsel to an ailing Labour Party. (Samir Hussein / WireImage via Getty Images)
During the pandemic, Tony Blair made a public appearance having clearly not been to the barber for some time. As many people noted, his lockdown hairstyle meant that he now bore an uncanny resemblance to Vigo the Carpathian, the supernatural villain in Ghostbusters II.
Born in 1505 but still terrorizing the citizens of New York in the late twentieth century, Vigo was fond of boasting that he sat upon a throne of blood during his time in office. He launched his political comeback with an emphatic declaration: “What was, will be. What is, will be no more! Now is the season of evil.”
If Blair issued a similar message to the world, it would differ in style from his usual communiqués, but hardly in substance. The comparison with Vigo resonated because it is genuinely difficult to speak about Blair in the language of secular politics. In his latter-day incarnation, he seems more like a creature of pure evil from the world of horror and fantasy than a man who once spent his time worrying about focus groups and swing voters in southern English constituencies.
While Blair’s physical resemblance to Vigo is beyond question, the character of Saruman in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings offers the closest fit for his modus operandi (perhaps with a dash of the mad Targaryen king in Game of Thrones, shrieking “Burn them all!” amid the ruins of his political project). Like Saruman, Blair is keen to work in tandem with the vilest actors on the face of the planet, and vain enough to think he can bend them to his will.
The Trump Whisperer
Blair’s latest intervention in British politics takes the form of a rambling diatribe, almost six thousand words in length, that purports to offer counsel to an ailing Labour Party. He published the screed on the website of his own Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, avoiding the need to engage with anyone who might have dared to suggest the need for some cuts.
In this case, a responsible editor would have felt obliged to recommend condensing the entire manifesto down to a few bullet points. This would at least have saved the valuable time of his readers without any loss of content. In truth, you could have anticipated what Blair was going to say down to the letter without reading a single word.
As always, Blair thinks the problem with the Labour Party is that it’s too left-wing. He sagely informs us that Keir Starmer should have ditched his manifesto pledges to strengthen workers’ rights and increase the minimum wage as soon as he won the 2024 election and concentrated instead on “making business feel respected and supported.” He also repeats a familiar demand for Labour to abandon the idea of phasing out fossil fuels on any timescale.
Blair makes no attempt to conceal his admiration for the international far-right movement, praising Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, and Javier Milei as leaders who “appear to be unbound, not constrained by conventional thinking.” He goes on to compliment Trump for his willingness to press down hard on the accelerator when he sees a brick wall approaching: “Yes, there are bits flying off the bus, there is a fair amount of debris and damage, the passengers feel mildly nauseous, but, with luck, he’s through the wall.”
There is nothing new about Blair’s enthusiasm for Trump: in a 2017 interview with his former press secretary Alastair Campbell, he was clearly hoping that the newly elected president would be the man to go to war with Iran. It is all too easy to picture his state of excitement as the missiles rained down on Tehran and Beirut this year. He reproaches Starmer for not having granted Trump full use of British military bases during his attack on Iran: “It’s not the best way to treat our ally.”
Oracular Visions
Blair was able to barge his way to the top of the news agenda, securing an interview on the BBC’s Today program — the most valuable piece of real estate in British journalism — where he was able to elaborate on his chosen themes. Blair seemed to be especially furious with Andy Burnham, one of the leading contenders to replace Starmer, for having referred critically to “forty years of neoliberalism.” He was clearly horrified by the suggestion that Margaret Thatcher had left behind a harmful legacy for British society.
The most tiresome aspect of the whole business is the pretense that Blair is speaking for himself and offering his deep thoughts on the state of the world, informed by his experience of high office. Even those who question the value of his ideas are only willing to say that Blair may be out of touch with contemporary Britain.
The reality, as everyone knows full well, is that Blair has offered his Institute for Global Change as a glorified advertising billboard for its wealthy funders. The tech billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison gave Blair’s vanity project $130 million between 2021 and 2023, and pledged another $218 million by the end of 2025.
That largesse enabled the institute to increase its number of staff dramatically, from two hundred to nearly a thousand. Every time Blair rails against net-zero targets or gushes about the virtues of AI, he is reading out a sponsored message from Ellison and his other funding sources.
That is just one of several ways in which Blair has sold his services as a mouthpiece to the highest bidder. It is a form of journalistic malpractice to report on Blair’s call for greater subservience to the Trump administration without mentioning his intimate role in Trump’s grotesque scheme to transform Gaza into a real estate opportunity for his son-in-law Jared Kushner and assorted cronies.
They Were the Future, Once
There is another sense in which Blair resembles a figure from contemporary horror or ancient mythology. He appears to have the ability to cast a spell on British journalists that prevents them from seeing him in his actual form. In their eyes, he will always be the shiny, youthful election winner of 1997, the political expression of Britpop and Cool Britannia. This sinister form of enchantment conceals the visage of a degraded huckster with an inexhaustible appetite for human suffering.
Perhaps we don’t need to resort to supernatural explanations. Perhaps Blair simply reminds his loyal disciples of a time when they were young and relevant too, and didn’t find the world so perplexing. For the rest of us, the priority should be finding a way to exorcize this malign spirit once and for all.