The Magical Blair Machine

Imagine a magnificent and magical machine that has been custom-built for a single purpose. For the machine to be activated, the thumbprint of its creator must be scanned. Any other person trying to wield its immense power will be greeted with flashing red lights: ACCESS DENIED. On top of this, the creator of the machine is a wizard of tremendous dark energy who has somehow transformed his enemies into feckless, lazy, cowardly, vapid and homosexual clowns such that even if the machine worked for them, they would use it for nothing but absurd ends. This is something like the situation in the United Kingdom since 2010. The wizard is, of course, the Dark Lord, Tony Blair, and the machine is the entire British system of power, including the civil service and every ‘independent body’ of ‘governmental oversight’ established since 1997, which include Ofcom, the Supreme Court and various other quasi-legal-institutions that were completely made-up by Blair. Some people ask me why I seem so transfixed by this man, but not to be so would be like trying to study the Galactic Empire without focusing on Emperor Palpatine. In this country, there is one game in town, and his name is ‘Tone’.

            Throughout the election, I maintained – including on some relatively high-profile appearances – that the best outcome would be for Labour to attain 600. Although ‘Zero Seats’ went mainstream, I felt that one aspect of my argument never landed and was never accepted by the bulk of the audience, who despite recognising that the Tory Party is stuffed to the gills with the above-mentioned clowns, nonetheless still have their heads filled with arguments from those clowns. To recap, I argued: once Sir Keir Starmer becomes Prime Minister, the machine will magically start to work for him and the problems which dogged the Tories for fourteen years across every front would, equally as magically, disintegrate. I foresaw Starmer getting the trains to run on time, fixing the potholes, reducing immigration and even ‘stopping the boats’. I maintain that this will happen because Blair has given Starmer his blessing to use his machine. Where the fat thumb of Boris Johnson, the cheese-stained thumb of Liz Truss, or the brown thumb of Rishi Sunak resulted in the machine refusing to do anything but undermine and mock the Prime Minister in a swirl of chaos, under the boring managerial thumb of Starmer, we will see the machine grant him whatever he wants in harmony and order. Now Witness the Firepower of this Fully Armed and Operational Battle Station!

            Starmer has been Prime Minister for just over a week, and this has already started to happen. After months of junior doctors’ strikes which dogged Sunak’s government, Wes Streeting – who spoke at the Tony Blair Institute on Tuesday 9^th July 2024 –  on the same day seemed, as if by magic, to end the doctors’ strike. Three days later, on Friday 12^th July, a senior civil servant penned a story in The Guardian, with the headline ‘After years of being gaslit by government, we civil servants can breathe again under Labour’. Here is how that article starts:

I joined the civil service when Tony Blair was in his pre-Iraq pomp, not long after his ‘new dawn’ speech sent many people’s expectations – after 18 years of increasingly sleaze-spattered Tory rule – soaring. Our boss at the time, the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service Robin (now Lord) Butler, famously said to Blair at his very first cabinet meeting: ‘Now what?’

The machine is happy to be back at the feet of the master. And, as we have witnessed, the master is only too happy to tell the machine exactly what to do. Blair followed this up with high-profile interviews in The Guardian and on the BBC’s Newsnight in Kirsty Wark’s last major assignment. It produced at least one amazing moment. In the middle of Labour’s first full week back in charge, Blair held a full day Future of Britain conference at which two sitting cabinet members, Wes Streeting and Pat McFadden, spoke.

Blair’s ‘advice’ (read: direct orders) will not be news to regular readers of mine: put the woke away to embody the sensible centrist ‘adults are back in the room’ frame; tackle immigration to contain populism; embrace AI; and fully implement digital ID. In fact, so prominent has been the re-emergence of the Dark Lord that he has attracted some backlash. In Unherd (who is it for), Aaron ‘Ice Cream’ Bastani pointed out that ‘Blair wants to run Starmer’s government’, which echoed a wider outcry on social media against his interventions. At least initially, this resulted in the new government rejecting Blair’s calls for digital ID. Starmer is off to a bad start here, he – or at least some element around him (see Sue Grey and Morgan McSweeney who I discussed here) – seems to think that he has been elected by ‘the people’ to lead the nation as opposed to anointed by Blair to carry out his bidding. This total impertinence will not stand! Blair, hiding obvious anger, admitted that they might take ‘some persuading’ (read: torture by force lightning until they submit to compliance).

Other commentators, those inferior to yours truly, think that this is a sign that the influence of Blair is slipping. Such people think that, despite his 1,000+ employees and worldwide infrastructure, Blair is now on the outside looking in, desperately seeking to influence Starmer, who is keeping him out. This is a delusion. Blair understands perhaps more than any man in the world how the media landscape works. He is reminding Starmer that with one or two interventions he can set the news agenda for an entire week. The people who matter are not randoms on Twitter or Aaron Bastani, but The Financial Times, who notably backed Blair up. The press did not, as some might expect, automatically side with Starmer, but rather asked why Blair’s advice was being rejected. Remember, this machine works for Blair, not for Starmer. Quietly, on an edition of Peston, another cabinet minister, Peter Kyle, walked back the walk-back on digital ID and once again refused to rule them out. He said he is ‘focused on plans to roll out easier verification methods for online government services’, which is exactly what Blair wants. Industry insiders know that Labour will implement digital IDs and they are simply playing a semantic game between ‘ID cards’ and ‘digital ID’.

This will be the first lesson that the Starmer Ministry must learn, and, if necessary, they will learn it the hard way. The machine does not work ‘for Labour’, it would not have worked under any circumstances for Jeremy Corbyn, it did not even work that well for Gordon Brown in the 2007 to 2010 period, it works for Blair. Starmer is not in Number 10 on some popular mandate, he is there because he has been selected by the Dark Lord. Divine power flows downwards and it is bestowed from monarch to noble. Blair has bestowed Starmer; he has, in effect, leased him the magic machine as a medieval king may lease an estate to a vassal. Starmer cannot possibly believe that, now he has the top job, he has genuine autonomy, agency or power separate from Blair, that is simply not how this works. Rather, he will be tasked to discipline his cabinet, to stop them speaking out of turn, and to get on with the task at hand: namely, to get on with the job of implementing Blair’s vision for the nation. Should Starmer fail, he will be replaced someone more suitable, someone less wilful and insubordinate.