The dramatis personae seemed predictable for the most significant by-election in a century. The political psychodrama that can decide the fate of the prime minister, who succeeds him, the perilous future of the Labour Party and the very shape of Britain’s electoral system.
Andy Burnham, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage, Reform UK’s quirky plumber candidate, Rupert Lowe’s Musk-championed Restore Britain party (‘We’re harder right than the Farage lot’) were all guaranteed to figure. So, too, Alan Milburn with his well-trailed NEET report.
But then, with one explosive essay, an unexpected star actor took centre stage, dominating the political debate, the newspaper headlines, the bulletins, the phone-in shows, the social media battleground et al.
Posing huge, still not truly answered questions. Just what is Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair up to? What motivated Labour’s former prime minister, undefeated triple election winner, to detonate a timebomb in the middle of the government’s existential crisis and a make-or-break by-election? Genuine concern for Labour’s future? An ego trip by a very rich and controversial figure addicted to being relevant and influential? A man anxious to curry favour with the Big Tech US AI titans, one of whom, multi-billionaire Larry Ellison, is a major funder of Blair’s influential but controversial institute? Or maybe just a temptation to create mischief by a man who never truly accepted being ousted as prime minister or accepted that the Iraq War was historic folly not triumph?
An historic essay war
But historians may well dub the ultimate outcome as The Essay Wars, given Blair’s initial essay sparked essay responses from aspiring Labour prime ministerial rivals, Burnham and Streeting and then a 3,000-word essay rebuttal of Blair’s intervention by a beleaguered Keir Starmer himself.
A fascinating twist to an ongoing tale is that Blair’s essay saw him winning plaudits from right-wing papers like the Mail who normally delight in denigrating him at every opportunity, while seriously stress testing Labour simpatico titles like The Guardian.
Sunday’s Observer front page with a ‘mash up’ image combining features of Blair, Starmer, Burnham and Streeting, surrounded by trails of inside content contributions … Andy Burnham’s ‘The London set have run Labour too long’… Andrew Rawnsley’s ‘Blair is a victim of self-delusion’… Rachel Sylvester’s ‘A revolution is coming: proportional representation’ and ‘My institute hasn’t been bought off by tech bros. AI is blowing my mind’. Yes, the unrepentant man himself was up for penning a second essay for The Observer.
But the bright red splash headline chosen by The Observer? ‘Labour rips itself apart’.
Gagging over Dr Blair’s prescription
Under the headline, ‘Dr Blair’s prescription has made his party gag but at least it’s forced Labour to engage with ideas… the former leader’s provocative essay has provide a whetstone for Andy Burnham to sharpen his left-wing credentials’, veteran political commentator Rawnsley writes: “To those who have denigrated his initial ‘playing with fire’ essay as out of touch and out of date, he insists that ‘progressive orthodoxy’ will not do and only ‘transformative’ thinking will answer the problems facing Britain and his party.
“One thing we have learned from this turbulent episode is about Sir Tony himself. He had a decade in Downing Street. He recently turned 73. He is not short of a bob or two. He could be taking it easy and putting his feet up on a sun lounger. Having lambasted the party he used to lead for its ‘almost infinite capacity for self-delusion, many of its members fervently wish he’d go gently into retirement. Yet he is possessed by what one old friend calls a ‘near-manic’ desire to be at the centre of debate. Call it a lust for attention if you want to be rude; call it a yearning to remain relevant if you want to be kinder. Yet the 5,700-word encyclical released by his Institute for Global Change fizzes with fury. He has often sounded disappointed about Labour, but he’s never been this brutal. He meant to wound the Starmer government when he quoted John Adams, the second president of the United States: ‘I totter with every breeze’.”
A hard to swallow menu
Rawnsley, who has known Bair well for years, concedes: “There’s much reasonable people can nod along with. Labour won the last election not by acclaim but as the ‘default’ alternative to the Tories. Sir Keir Starmer has made significant blunders since he came to power. But a leadership change is ‘irrelevant’ if Labour lacks a coherent plan and ‘the ability to get things done’. He gets some big calls right. Nearly all our senior politicians know that the pensions triple lock is unsustainable. It persists because none of them have yet summoned the courage to act. Alan Milburn’s penetrating report into how Britain is failing its young people underscores his case for welfare reform.
“His prospectus wants Labour to hug more closely to Donald Trump, ditch commitment to net zero, scrap the enhancement of workers’ rights, reduce tax and regulation on business… to use one of his own favourite phrase, it is ‘not serious’ to imagine that the current Labour leader or any of his putative replacements are going to eat that menu. The Blair manifesto would be a dramatic shift to the right at a time when Labour is tilting to the left.”
His final paragraph? “It is not entirely a bad thing that Labour is engaged in a battle of ideas, though it would have been better to have waged it before the 2024 general election. He is correct that successful political leader must have ‘an attitude, a tribe, and a project’. But if he thinks that Labour is in a mood to heed his advice, he is himself a victim of self-delusion.”
‘I was quite good at winning elections’
The Guardian struck a similar tone with a ‘Tony Blair’s essay on Labour failings gets full marks for being unhelpful’ headline on senior political correspondent Peter Walker’s May 26th reaction column. Wrote Walker mockingly: “Did Tony Blair ever mention he was quite good at winning elections? If you happened to miss it, then his 5,700-word opus on where Labour, Keir Starmer and the UK more generally have gone wrong is here to remind you. Several times.
“Overall, the intervention by the former prime minister almost feels designed to inflict maximum annoyance on his party, in terms of the content of the repeated criticism and the timing, before a byelection in Makerfield that could shape Labour’s destiny for years to come.
Hobnobbing with Trump
“He is becoming less and less relevant was one of the more polite responses about a man who left frontline politics nearly 20 years ago and is now mainly seen at glitzy, meet-and-greets such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, or hobnobbing with Donald Trump as part of his Gaza Board of Peace.”
A string of hostile or debunking Guardian columnists, together with a largely furious Readers’ Mailbag, wouldn’t have played well with Blair.
Inequality was the word missing from that Blair essay that united Labour leadership rivals Burnham and Streeting, with both denouncing its absence in articles and interviews for The Guardian, Times, Observer, Mail and Mirror.
Right-wing papers cheerlead for Blair
But, overall, the former PM would have enjoyed more his coverage in the right-wing titles. Take the Daily Mail’s May 27th splash: ‘NOW BLAIR SAVAGES LABOUR’S LURCH TO THE LEFT’ targeting Burnham, in particular. The same day leader: ‘Will Starmer listen to blast from Blair?’ which included, “The Daily Mail has had its differences with Sir Tony, but it is difficult to fault his assessment that Labour came to power with ‘no worked out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world’.”
While Andrew Neil’s Saturday essay in the Mail carried the pro-Blair headline, ‘My real beef with Streeting and Burnham? They are promoting the same dreary socialist agenda that brought this country to its knees in the 70s’.
His essay opens with: “The negative – even hostile – response of many Labour politicians to Tony Blair’s searing critique of the government tells you everything you need to know about where today’s party stands on the key issues.
“Nowhere was that more apparent than in the responses of the most active pretenders to Keir Starmer’s throne – Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting. It was telling that both chose to berate Blair for failing to highlight ‘inequality’ in his missive.
“‘It was’, opined Streeting, ‘the striking weakness in Blair’s intervention, the defining issue of our age which he barely confronted at all… the economic, social and democratic fracture running through modern Britain’. And Streeting is supposed to be the Blairite.”
Quoting Burnham, “Blair doesn’t mention inequality once… if you don’t get how that’s driving politics now, then you are not understanding what’s going on.” Neil weighs in with: “So there you have it. The supposed left and right of the party united in their condemnation of Blair, the most successful leader in the history of their party by a country mile. Both even singing from the same critical song sheet.
Truly dead and buried?
“Burnham and Streeting, of course, are vying for the affections of the MPs, trade unions and activists who could make them leader – and the Left is now the dominant force in all three constituent parts of the Labour tribe. It’s equally clear Burnham and Streeting have concluded there are no votes in cosying up to Blair or his ideas either. Blairism in the Labour Party is truly dead and buried.”
Not so much in the Tory party, perhaps? As one senior Tory MP put it to me only half-jokingly: “Kemi could almost adopt Blair’s mini-manifesto essay and incorporate it into her own for the next general election!” Indeed, Badenoch, in an open ‘Dear Tony’ letter to The Times on May 30th, prompted the headline: ‘Labour rejected Blair’s best ideas’.
How dare you, Andy?
The Mail, of course, is determined to inflict maximum damage on the Labour government, Starmer’s tottering premiership and the candidates to replace him. Witness the paper giving a large op-ed to the former Labour MP and shadow minister John Woodcock headlined: ‘Tony Blair championed aspiration – he knew the voters. But now Labour’s leaders pander only to their left-wing activists.”
Wrote Woodcock: “The Labour Party turned on Sir Tony Blair once gain this week for committing the cardinal sin of stating the bleeding obvious, he was rounded on by all the usual suspects. Despite the fact that Tony Blair is the most successful Labour prime minister this country has ever known, or is ever likely to know, Andy Burnham – the Mayor of Greater Manchester and the man most likely to be our next PM – had the gall to accuse him of a failure to understand modern politics.”
It goes without saying that Woodcock was always a controversial right-wing figure in the party with a chequered track record.
Insulting chameleons?
Alongside the Woodcock rant, the Mail’s main leader headline asked: ‘Who could trust a word Burnham says?’. It began: “Andy Burnham has been described as a political chameleon. Some may regard this as a little insulting to real chameleons. So desperate is he to return to parliament and ultimately become prime minister that he appears willing to bend or break any of his principles – however strongly felt.”
The Mail’s determination to thwart Burnham displayed on its June 1st splash ‘YOU’VE NOT WON ANYTHING YET, ANDY!’. With a sub-head, ‘Echoes of Neil Kinnock as cocky Burnham accused of taking voters for granted’.
The occasion was a photo of Burnham flexing his muscles at the start of Sunday’s Great Manchester Run and displaying his tattoo of the city’s worker bee symbol. The mayor went on to to finish the 10km charity run in a very respectable 53 minutes. But to the Mail, the accusation was that the ‘self-styled King of the North’ was cynically determined to use the event to ‘behave like a prime minister in waiting’. Its main leader headlined: ‘King of the North is just a running joke’. It began: “Another day, another photo of Andy Burnham prancing along in his jogging gear. The embarrassingly skimpy shorts are mercifully back in the drawer, but the message is the same: ‘I may be 56, but I’m still a vigorous powerhouse of a man. Vote for me and I’ll get the country moving!’.”
The Mail gets personal
The increasingly personal attacks on Burnham by the Mail evidence of their desperation to see him lose the Makerfield by-election and along with it his prime ministerial hopes. With the Tories nowhere in the polling, the Mail is backing a Reform victory which explains why – in line with its escalating ‘Unite the Right’ strategy – it unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Tories and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party to withdraw from the field.
On May 27th, the Mail even ran a Stephen Pollard guest column appeal to the odious Restore leader headlined: ‘If Rupert Lowe sets aside his vanity, he could be the hero of the hour. If he doesn’t, Britain faces disaster’. A move triggered by the current Makerfield polling putting Burnham narrowly ahead of Reform but toss in Restore’s much smaller stats and it suggests the majority of voters want a right-wing victory not a Burnham one.
While alongside its June 1st ‘Running Joke’ leader assault on Burnham, the Mail carried a Stephen Glover polemic, ‘Why the left-wing Blob will do everything in its power to subvert and destroy a future Reform government’. It goes on to laud Nigel Farage as the ‘most consequential British politician of our age’ and lambast the BBC over a highly speculative splash in the previous days Mail on Sunday claiming that ‘woke’ forces at the broadcaster have effectively ‘banned’ Farage from being the guest on Desert Island Discs. Despite both Starmer and Badenoch’s previous appearances.
Enter Mandy, centre stage, still grabbing headlines
On Monday, another Blair era figure took centre stage in the Labour psychodrama with the much-anticipated parliamentary release of 1,500 pages documenting the disastrous Mandelson ambassadorial appointment. The highly embarrassing treasure trove of WhatsApps, texts and emails revealed that Mandelson remained a treacherous, duplicitous, Machiavellian meddler even after he arrived in Washington. It also exposed how many senior ministers in Starmer’s team, who should have known better, were prepared to suck up to Mandelson, seek his advice or simply moan about their lot and Keir Starmer’s leadership. Overall the critical, patronising tone of the Prince of Darkness’s missives is that of a man with a conceit the size of Mount Olympus.
The release dominated Tuesday’s front pages, whether in right or left leaning titles. Samples: ‘Labour’s poisonous puppet master and a £1million cover-up… the 1,500 pages are a sea of Tipp-Ex. But they still expose malign back-biting of peer for whom Starmer sabotaged his own career by making him US ambassador’(Daily Mail); ‘Mandelson’s verdict on Starmer: Bereft and beleaguered’(The Independent); ‘WHAT IS LEFT TO HIDE? … Extraordinary treachery behind Keir Starmer’s back further undermine the PM’s position. But now Mandy is refusing to hand over his private phone’ (Daily Mirror); ‘Mandelson files reveal how the PM’s authority crumbled’ (the i); ‘Every meeting I have is: Who can we tax to pay benefits to others’ (Daily Telegraph); ‘Labour only asks who can be taxed to pay benefits (The Times); ‘Mandy: Hire me, I would make sure you will never regret it!’ (Metro).
Regrets all round
The latter stemming from a handwritten note Mandelson wrote to then Foreign Secretary David Lammy pleading for Britain’s top diplomatic post. It also figures as the payoff line to The Times excoriating Tuesday leader ‘Dirty Laundry: As the Mandelson messages expose the hollowness at the heart of this government, there is plenty of regret to go around.’
For its part, on Tuesday, the Mail gave prominence to a review of the Mandelson Files by regular polemicist Dan Hodges, the scion of Oscar-winning Labour legend Glenda Jackson and himself once a Tony Blair worshipper, under the headline: ‘A whitewash to make Nixon blush – but it’s all pointless because we know how this ends for Keir…’
Particularly embarrassing was the emergence in Thursday’s papers of messages to Mandelson from the PM’s closest ally, Chief Secretary Darren Jones, that weren’t included in the official files release. They were leaked to The Spectator magazine and quickly seized on and published prominently by The Times, Mail, Guardian and broadcast bulletins.
In them, Jones sympathises with Mandelson over his sacking, telling him he’d been doing a “great job” as Washington Ambassador. They also reveal that Jones had even sought Mandelson's advice on a planned cabinet reshuffle, while making indiscreet comments about senior cabinet colleagues. Quite how they came to be leaked and who by an intriguing story in itself.
It puts a question mark over whether Jones, normally one of the government’s smoother operators, can survive in his role as the PM’s right-hand man.
One Labour figure who knew he wouldn’t figure in the cringeworthy, toe- curling files was Andy Burnham. But the team around him are only too aware that his political opponents and the right-wing papers will still capitalise on the fallout to try and sabotage Labour’s Makerfield chances and his prime ministerial prospects. And with the polling so close, they can’t afford the Mandelson Files revelations to deter Labour voters from turning out or switching to Reform.
Which is why Burnham was quickly out of the box on Monday to react to the Mandelson Files release with this statement: “Today’s revelations will further damage people’ confidence in our political system. When I left Westminster 10 years ago, I did so in the belief that it needed fundamental culture change. I remain of that view and believe that change can’t come soon enough. People have lost faith in a Westminster system which puts private vested interests above the wider public interest and concentrates too much power in too few hands.
“We urgently need a national politics which, rather than looking past places like Makerfield, properly works for them. We need a new political culture that is rooted in accountability and a genuine focus on the priorities of working people. If we are serious about restoring trust in politics, we must rebuild a system where public service is at the heart of decision-making.”
Exploiting Nowak horror?
Burnham was also quick on Tuesday to weigh in on the Henry Nowak murder issue, suggesting changes are needed in police policy while calling for restraint while an IOPC investigation takes place. It reflected a clear fear that Reform and Restore will seek to exploit it during the finely-balance Makerfield by-election campaign – fear partly-fuelled by Nigel Farage’s controversial, provocative ‘pure, cold, hard rage’ intervention and the violent clashes between far-right protesters and police in Southampton. Demonstrations spearheaded by – yes, you’ve guessed it – ‘Tommy Robinson’ (aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon).
Certainly, the horrific Nowak case dominated virtually every front page on Wednesday and Thursday as well as igniting passionate parliamentary exchanges. With the far right in the UK and US – including Elon Musk – seeking to stir up an alleged ‘two-tier policing’ firestorm of hatred and intimidation in defiance of the public appeals of the 18-year-old student victim’s own family.
It also produced a dramatic scene at PMQs when Farage making his first appearance since the row over his £5m ‘gift’ erupted pressed his ‘two tier policing charge’, mitigated the previous night’s violence in Southampton and predicted more could follow. He was greeted with angry jeers. But it triggered one of Starmer’s finest moments as he angrily, emotionally responded accusing the Reform leader of stirring violence and betraying the call by Henry Nowak’s father that his son’s murder should not be politicised.
Meanwhile one member of Andy Burnham’s campaign team put it to me privately: “If Andy doesn’t win this by-election and go on to be prime minister, then the Curse of Mandelson, cynical right-wing exploitation of the Nowak tragedy and the power of papers like the Mail and Telegraph will have been decisive.”
With polling day looming on Waterloo Day (June 18th) it won’t be long before Burnham discovers whether he’s Bonaparte or following in Wellington’s boot steps by marching on to become prime minister.
