The Dubious, Yet Still Useful, Advice of Tony Blair

Mehdi Hasan on why the Labour party shouldn't listen to Tony Blair:

1) On Blair's watch, Labour lost four million votes between 1997 and 2005. Lest we forget, in the 2005 general election, Blair was re-elected with a vote share of 35 per cent - that's less than the majority-less Cameron achieved in 2010. Blair won in 2005 because his opponent was Michael Howard.

Couple of points here. Firstly, Blair may have lost circa 4 million votes between 1997 and 2005, but he also gained around 2 million for Labour in 1997 and in doing so gave the Labour party a formidable majority that allowed it to stay in power even as voters began to desert Labour. Which leads me nicely to the second point - Blair didn't win in 1997 because he was up against Howard (who actually managed to make 2005 a competitive General Election in a way that Hague or IDS would never have been able to manage) but because of Britain's curious electoral system that is often very much biased towards the incumbent. Indeed, that's why Cameron - despite routing Labour in many respects - was unable to form a government in 2010 unaided.

2) When Blair left office in the summer of 2007, his personal poll ratings were falling - and so too were the Labour Party's. As the authors of the new book, Explaining Cameron's Coalition, argue, "Blair's ratings were falling from 1997 and that, even if Labour had not changed leader, it is likely that Blair's would have been as low as Brown's were by 2010."

So? This shows the inherent naive way of thinking of many Labour supporters. The choice was not simply between Blair and Brown, no matter how the post-Blair succession actually went. There could have been any number of other MPs to replace Blair when he resigned had Brown not stitched up that leadership contest like a second-rate Stalin. Blair and Brown would have been shit in 2010, fine. What about Alan Johnson? Or Jack Straw? Or maybe even David Miliband? There were other potential leaders out there who would have been more popular than both Blair and Brown.

3) Blair invaded Iraq. Regardless of whether you think it was right or wrong to topple Saddam Hussein, politically, the war was a massive misjudgement on Blair's part. It split his party and the country, cost him his political capital, wrecked his reputation and undermined any legacy he might have hoped to leave behind as a three-time election winner. As the former Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell once put it, "Mary Tudor had Calais engraved on her heart. Blair will have Iraq engraved on his heart and there is no escaping it."

Well, this is true - even thought the phrasing makes me picture Blair trying to invade Iraq single-handedly. Blair's legacy will forever be tarnished by the pointless, illegal war in Iraq. His decision to climb into the arsehole of the least intelligent and capable President in living memory was such an error of judgement that it makes every other decision he ever made open to question. But the fact that he dropped the ball in such an lethal way when it came to Iraq can't change the fact that he is perhaps, in electoral terms anyway, the most successful Labour leader of all time. If memory serves, he's the only Labour leader to have fought General Elections and not lost at least one of them.

So Hasan is right, in a sense - Miliband Minor should be wary of the advice of one Anthony Blair. But he should also be wary of not taking that advice when it comes to electioneering. Blair won three successive General Elections on the trot and - as much as I openly despise the truculent shit - anyone wanting to win a General Election for themselves should at least think about why Blair managed to achieve what he achieved.