It’s time to bring back Blair Centrist dads, rejoice

William Hague’s famous 2008 sketch of the return of Blair has suddenly returned as the fantasy of centrist dads everywhere. A motorcade sweeps into Downing Street. A man gets out, silky hair shimmering in the summer light. His expression is grave, but he wears it lightly; he is daunted by the task ahead but also unmistakably excited. A crowd gathers to witness the moment, cheering his name, waving their flags. He looks up at them with his trademark smile. “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” And then, as he walks up to the black door of Number 10, he turns around, weary yet determined. “Today, enough of talking: it is time now to do.”

How much ink has been spilled, in recent months, on the matter of “Anglo-Gaullism”? Here he is, at last, le Général — and he was under our noses all along! The actual policies of de Gaulle, his “certain idea of France”, all this was only secondary. The real lesson of Gaullism is this: when the state is on the edge of crisis, when it is crying out for a radical reimagining, it is best to entrust power to one who has already proved his mettle.

Tony Blair has proved his mettle. We want economic growth, political stability, and a state that can do things; he brought us all these things before, and he can do so again. Iraq might have been a catastrophe, but other countries know the benign power of his touch. Perhaps soon our cityscapes will contain his statues; perhaps our own playgrounds will teem with “Toniblers”.

Of course, we know it cannot be. Blair is unpopular, we are told, hated by the Left for Iraq, by the Right for the constitutional mess he left behind, and by both for the globalism he let rip. He continues to make fortunes from dodgy regimes and multinational companies who pay him for his advice. He was the future once, people say; he is now best left in the past. And yet the sound of him on the radio, deftly batting away Nick Robinson’s questions and presenting a considered plan for government, cannot help but make the heart flutter. The way he speaks about Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, those misguided little pipsqueaks, calls to mind that irritating centrist cliché of the “adults in the room”. He has aged graciously, and his years of rest have served him well — one gets the sense (thanks perhaps to his Big Tech, jet-setter lifestyle) that he is really plugged into the world, that he knows what it’s all about. Surely it is time to state the obvious without shame: the argument for his return has become impossible to ignore.

The Labour Party is searching for a Prime Minister who can do the job and win elections. Blair can do the job, is more popular nationally than Starmer, and would demolish any rival in a debate. He is not a sitting MP, but Andy Burnham shows us that this needn’t be an obstacle. Where there’s a will, there’s a way; surely we can find him a safe by-election.

It’s one of those events which, were it to occur, would somehow command that powerful feeling of inevitability. Ten years in power never was enough; “the Master” was always meant to be one of those political titans who bestrides generations. It was only the pettiness of Gordon Brown (and the bellicosity of George W. Bush) that cut his time short; it was only the pettiness of two subsequent Labour leaders that kept him out of the political discussion. The old cadre of Blairites, in their wilderness years, spoke of him as though he was the Mahdi in occultation. His spirit was present in Chuka Umunna and “Change UK”; Lord Adonis was a one-man “Bring Back Blair” brigade. In 2021 it was reported, to the excitement of SW1, that Blair was “on the verge of a comeback”. Here, at last, it is.

That comeback, a 5,700-word essay, may not appeal to the soggy center. It is not a hodgepodge of clichés about “moderation” and the “sensible center ground”. It says nothing about “polarization”, “extremism”, or some abstract, demonic force named “hate”. Blair’s “Radical Centrism” is not fence-sitting Lib Demmery — at one point he takes an easy shot at the Lib Dems. It is not the centrism of The Rest Is Politics, which makes a fetish out of umm-ing and ahh-ing before concluding that we should all be nice.

Blair’s centrism is a promiscuous sort: he picks up ideas wherever he finds them and takes them back home. He was never afraid to break the Left-wing shibboleths of his own party; he is not afraid to break “centrist” shibboleths, either. He confesses an admiration for Donald Trump; he wants to abandon Net Zero; when he says that the small boats must be dealt with “whatever it takes”, he hints that Britain should leave the ECHR. He does not speak histrionically about Reform meaning the End of Britain. He struck the right note on the trans question well before For Women Scotland, while much of the “sensible center” was busy defending the indefensible. He is clear-minded about the world. When he wrote an essay on antisemitism for The Free Press, he did not duck away from something that many of his political tribe would fear to address head-on. Antisemitism in the British Muslim community, he straightforwardly declared, is “frankly unacceptable”. Whatever charges Dominic Cummings might lay at Blair’s feet, he cannot call him an “NPC”.

Although Blair remains true as ever to the Atlanticism that wreaked disaster in Iraq, his essay may reveal some ambivalence about the constitutional reforms which his governments engineered. Given his emphasis on state capacity, he must regret some of the ways he diluted Westminster’s power and outsourced decisions and responsibilities to quangos, judges, and devolved administrations. Before the Blairite restoration, there ought perhaps to be some public statement of contrition. But if we could forgive Churchill for Gallipoli, we can surely forgive Blair this.

Perhaps we are prone to romanticizing the politicians of the past, but that tendency needn’t be wrong. Blair might not hold a candle to Churchill, who might not hold a candle to Disraeli. But nobody today — not Starmer, not Burnham, not Wes Streeting — can hold a candle to Blair.

If certain journalists are doing their Blair love-in, it’s safe to say that their feelings aren’t reciprocated. Their coverage of politics is a key part of Blair’s complaint. The media has helped to force politicians into a “24-hour pressure cooker”, which prevents them from seeing and studying the world. Blair is frustrated that “politics” seems now to mean Chris Mason and Beth Rigby, having got a taste of blood in Partygate, hunting after more Prime Ministerial scalps. What will people in the future make of the fact that, on the eve of one of the great world-historic revolutions, the arrival of AI, Britain’s chattering classes were obsessing over Peter Mandelson, Olly Robbins, and Lord Alli’s suits?

Blair offers a strong analysis for the collapse of the present government. A classic insult hurled at Sir Keir is that he was a “technocrat”. It sounds right. He looks the part, and has the CV to match. Perhaps this image helped him win the 2024 election. But really, as Blair says, the problem with Starmer is that he is given to the Labour Party’s fits of passion and delusion. Arriving in Downing Street without any clear vision of his own, he made himself the tool of deeper forces. The few times he has tried to break out of the Labour Party’s rigid cast of mind — winter fuel allowance, benefits reform — he has been beaten into submission by angry backbenchers. A good Labour leader would have put them in their place, but Starmer never had much authority to do so. Most Labour MPs in 1997 were acutely aware that they owed their victory to Blair. His strategies and gambles paid off. They were not “Labour MPs”, elected to do vague Labourish things. They were New Labour MPs, and they were elected to do Blair’s bidding.

Sir Keir has never established his authority in this way. He purged Corbyn, and he was to be rewarded by the electorate for doing so. Labour badly needed a rebrand after 2019, and Sir Keir gave it one. But it was only superficial; it never ascended to the realm of ideas. New Labour figures were summoned from the past — some, such as Peter Mandelson, fatefully. But New Labour was never emphatically asserted as the correct path, intellectually as well as electorally.

There is a revealing part of Blair’s essay where he describes meeting with Labour people before 2024. He asked them whether they were Old Labour or New Labour. The most common answer was that they rejected those categories; they were “Just Labour”. For the last two years we have had a “Just Labour” government. Starmer has implemented a Left-wing manifesto. That is true both tangibly — abolishing the two-child benefit cap, beefing up renters’ rights — and on the no less significant plane of symbolism: recognizing the state of Palestine, finishing Blair’s job in the House of Lords. And, as a token of thanks, the soft Left is scheming against him, all in favor of someone who did not even compete in the 2024 election, and can claim no part in Labour’s landslide victory. The Prime Minister, as his predecessor suggests, “totters in the breeze”. The backbenchers see this and know how to exploit it. Starmer had a mandate, but he never articulated what he had a mandate to do. Blair would have been less cautious, more forthcoming. He would have purged Corbyn, and he would have repudiated Corbynism. He would have told the party, and then the country, that they had bitter pills to swallow. They would, in the fullness of time, have to do some un-Labourish things; they would have to scrap the triple lock and Net Zero, water down the welfare state, make an accommodation with Trump, and turn the bulk of their attention to AI. Perhaps Blair, if given such a chance, would have won fewer seats at the election — but a massive majority has hardly been of much good to Starmer.

Britain faces a crisis of seriousness. We are becoming an unserious country. Blair is right to say that only an unserious country would cycle through seven Prime Ministers in ten years; only an unserious country would, as Blair says we are projected to do, spend more on disability benefits than defense. In happier times the priorities of government could be “education, education, education”. Such priorities presuppose that a government is capable of forming a clear vision, and then using its means to realize it. We cannot take these things for granted anymore. Blair is right that the priority today can only be efficacy, efficacy, efficacy.

The German historian Heinrich von Treitschke once remarked that the Prussian King Frederick William III, who was crushed by Napoleon, “seemed as if made to lead a well-ordered middling state honorably through quiet times”. These are not quiet times. It is a stroke of bad historical fortune that Starmer couldn’t have been Prime Minister between 1997 and 2007, and Blair Prime Minister today; each would have suited that moment better than the one they got. Starmer could have had that Love, Actually moment with an American president, refusing to send British troops to Iraq: he was a young and dashing human rights lawyer back then, as though plucked from a Richard Curtis romcom. Blair ripped apart a working constitution without due care; there is plenty of cause today to take a Jacobin chainsaw to the state. Blair developed a vision of social democracy that was committed to business, growth, and the extraordinary potential of technology; such a vision now is more needed than ever.

It’s not too late. Blair is a sprightly 73, a year younger than Lord Palmerston was when he began his second term as Prime Minister, over a decade younger than Gladstone during his final stint in Downing Street and five years younger than the American president was when elected for a second time. He is our Général de Gaulle; he is our Grand Old Man. We need him more than the Gazans do. Bring him back.

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