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Late last year, before Nigel Farage fell out of Elon Musk’s favour, the technology writer William Cullerne Bown asked a question that has since been rendered at least temporarily irrelevant: if it’s a problem for Musk to give Farage $100m, why is it fine for Larry Ellison to give Tony Blair $100m? Tech titan Ellison is reportedly donating huge sums to the Tony Blair Institute.
Before we even get to that question – and it’s a good one – there’s just a tiny adjustment we need to make on political vocabulary. We’ve been saying “Blairite” ever since there were two tribes, the other being “Brownite” (as in Gordon Brown). It may not have entered the dictionary until 2000, but insiders have been using Blairite for about 30 years.
By 2010, Blairite meant “part of Blair’s inner circle back in the day, a disciple of his brand of political realism; the kind of person who would never have a beard, who got invited to Rupert Murdoch’s summer parties, and didn’t talk to Labour members except to tell them to take their medicine”. Blairite meant David Miliband, a fact that was so incontrovertible to the British public that David Miliband spent the whole of 2010 denying he was a Blairite.
But that’s not what Tony Blair was like in 1994 at all. At the start, he was Mr Anything’s Possible; sure, he already spoke warmly of the private sector, but it was only later that that became a defining theme. This was a guy who took on the massed forces of business to bring in the National Minimum Wage, which was decried at the time as the end of British prosperity, later to become the most popular move that first government ever made. It was genuinely amusing to hear Jeremy Corbyn written off as a dangerous radical pinko in 2017, with a manifesto whose promises were in some cases identical to Tony Blair’s 1997 pledge card (reduce primary school classes to under 30) and in others (free tertiary education) no more or less than an OG Blairite would have considered their right.
Blair by 2005, post-Iraq, was a curious proposition, politically: more aligned with the US than with Europe; more presidential than prime ministerial in the loyalties he demanded from his cabinet; a man satisfied that his economic experiment had paid off. It was a little senseless, from the time Blair left office in 2007, to call anyone a Blairite: he was working for JP Morgan Chase and Zurich Financial Services, and buying multimillion-pound houses. Whatever his politics were, he didn’t seem to be looking for any disciples. Yet on and on we quested, and for years; who was the true Blairite in 2015? Was it Liz Kendall, fighting on an “only I understand how badly we’ve been defeated” ticket? Was it Yvette Cooper, once a “Blair babe” (different times, folks), who might still smell a bit Blair-y? The label had become an Arthurian sword; it was sitting right there for whoever could get it out of the rock. Nobody ever could.
None of that is as ridiculous as calling someone a Blairite now – which people persist in doing, whether that’s Wes Streeting (because he’s brought arch-Blairite Alan Milburn in to help with NHS reforms) or Keir Starmer’s team (closely advised by Peter Mandelson, who must be a Blairite, surely?). Except that nothing in any of them resembles early Blair, and now Blair himself has done the full rightward shift. Stung, one imagines, by criticism he thinks unfair, he has started doling out advice that could have come straight from Alf Garnett: maybe mentally ill people should just pull themselves together; maybe the best way to counter populists is to get tougher on immigration; maybe Labour’s challenge is to avoid “any vulnerability on wokeism”. Which would all be laughable, if it weren’t so incredibly well-funded, and so instead follows a familiar pattern: any conversation about politics that doesn’t include a plan to tax billionaires is probably a conversation a billionaire is paying someone to start. So maybe “Blairism” should now mean that. I don’t even care what we decide it means! So long as we’re all using it to mean the same thing.
