Tony Blair Speaks Out Against His Party — but Still Won’t Choose Honesty

By John Gustavsson

Saturday, May 30, 2026

 

It is rare that a former head of government authors a 5,000-word essay, and even rarer that enough people read it for the essay to create headlines in newspapers and inspire snap opinion polls to understand the public’s view on its prescriptions. Yet that is what an essay by Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister between 1997 and 2007, has accomplished. In the essay, Blair slams the Labour Party, distances himself from key policies, and criticizes all four of his successors. While it is insightful, what it doesn’t say is at least as interesting as what it does.

 

Tony Blair was an electoral juggernaut, ending 18 years of Tory rule in 1997 and winning three elections in total, two of which were landslides. That, however, is not what he is remembered for. A YouGov poll last year showed only 22 percent of Brits hold a favorable view of him, and even among Labour voters, Blair’s numbers were underwater. Blair’s reputation was initially tarnished by the Iraq War, but today, the Labour faithful disown him chiefly for his economic policies, which they deem to have been insufficiently left-wing.

 

Few are surprised that Blair dislikes the direction his party has taken since he left office. In some ways, the essay reads like an exasperated man finally getting everything off his chest: Blair criticizes two of the four men who have gone on to succeed him as Labour Party leader by name and takes very thinly veiled shots at the other two. And the two candidates — Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting — who are most likely to succeed Keir Starmer? He’s not very happy with them either, chiding them for performative politics and lack of policy focus. They both felt the need to defend themselves, as did Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn.

 

The first answer to the question of why Blair is doing this now is that Labour is in the early stages of a leadership contest, and Blair wants to have a say in who takes over the steering wheel. Yet Blair is not endorsing any candidate, and no prospective candidate runs on a platform anything like the one he outlines.

 

In any case, a new party leader would not be able to deviate from the 2024 election manifesto without risking backbench rebellion; despite winning a huge majority, Starmer was forced to back down from desperately needed welfare reforms after one such rebellion. The only way a new leader could embrace his proposed policies would be if they called a snap election — a risky move, given Labour’s precarious poll numbers.

 

The second answer is simpler, and more personal: Blair is fed up with being the party’s black sheep and wants to defend himself. As he alludes to in the essay, Blair’s premiership was the last time the U.K. experienced high economic growth on par with the United States. While achieving economic growth does not mean a political leader should be immune from criticism, it is strange how little this fact is acknowledged. Since 2010, Western Europe — Britain included — has lagged behind the U.S., and yet the political debate rarely revolves around growth.

 

The essay can certainly be read as defensive: Blair begins by reminding everyone that he won three elections. No Labour leader had ever won three elections in a row, and the party had never enjoyed such a long stretch in power before. His pent-up frustration at his ostracization by the party he led is palpable.

 

Perhaps the kindest interpretation of the essay’s timing is that Blair feels a statesmanlike responsibility to step up at a time of crisis and bring his party’s — and country’s — attention back to the issues that matter. A great portion of the essay deals with the current revolution in artificial intelligence. Blair is greatly (and in my view, rightly) concerned that Britain will miss out and follow the EU’s lead in overregulating technology. Blair is also worried that high utility prices will choke out energy-intensive AI industries.

 

Indeed, Blair is so worried about this that he calls for Labour to abandon net-zero, or at least exempt the energy sector from it. The goal right now must be to produce cheap energy, not green energy. On this topic, there is little doubt that Blair, whose premiership covered most of the early dot-com revolution, is sincere. Even if Blair’s attitude toward Starmer and his would-be successors is “a plague on both your houses,” he clearly wants to force all of them to at least talk about AI and contend with Britain’s dire energy shortage, rather than spend the rest of the term droning on about inequality (which isn’t even rising).

 

Unfortunately, the essay suffers greatly from Blair’s lack of self-reflection. While he may feel that he’s been flagellated enough by others not to have to do it to himself, this is quite simply not how it works. Whether the reason for his essay is to attempt to influence internal party politics, defend his record, or affect British policies on energy and AI, Blair cannot do so effectively without confronting his actions. He is right about net-zero, but his argument would have come off as more convincing if he had conceded that he himself as PM opposed nuclear power (though his view did change during his final year in office).

 

One bombshell delivered in the essay is Blair’s renunciation of all efforts to rejoin the European Union. Whatever other impact the essay may or may not have in the long term, this is a major setback for rejoiners (who over the past few weeks have been gaining serious momentum), with leadership contender Wes Streeting endorsing the rejoining effort, an EU official dangling a potential “fast-track” reentry process should Britain apply, and polls indicating Brits want to rejoin.

 

Tony Blair, by far the most pro-European prime minister his country ever had, laments Brexit but says the U.K. must first fix its economic growth problem in order to be able to negotiate with the EU from a position of strength. While he does not say it outright, Blair, a man steeped in realpolitik, knows that Britain, if it attempted to rejoin now, would not get the favorable terms it had before Brexit. As a member, Britain received a roughly 20 percent rebate on its membership fee, was exempt from having to adopt the Euro or the borderless Schengen area, and had a big pile of other opt-outs, most of them won in negotiations by his predecessor John Major. While I personally disagree with Blair’s negative view of Brexit, there is no denying that, compared to any other member, Britain had a generous deal with Brussels.

 

Nobody expected Tony Blair to renounce his Europhilia, but a moment of self-reflection would have been a nice touch. Has Blair ever wondered whether his selling Britain’s opt-out on social policy for a bowl of stew might have contributed to anti-EU sentiment by giving the EU power over an area that his predecessor had painstakingly ensured it wouldn’t be able to touch? Has he ever wondered whether his voluntarily and enthusiastically agreeing to reduce Britain’s aforementioned membership fee rebate may have been unwise, seeing as how the cost of the membership was another major talking point for the Brexiteers?

 

Blair is right that Britain, were it to attempt to reenter the union, would not be negotiating from a position of strength, in part because of its poor economic state. Yet even when it was one of the largest and fastest-growing members of the union, Britain hardly used this “position of strength” under Blair.

 

The reason Blair is speaking up now is likely a mix of all the reasons above. But regardless of which reason is the dominating one, if he wants people to listen, he needs to take a page out of the book of his much-less-successful Tory successor, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. While Sunak’s premiership ended in disaster for his party, he’s been open about his shortcomings, including his lack of focus, failure to prioritize economic growth, and overpromising on immigration. On that last point, the fact that Blair can speak of the need people have for a tribe and the necessity of stopping illegal immigration “whatever it takes,” without reflecting on his own record, suggests that underneath a more eloquent and well-mannered surface, Blair hides a narcissism on par with that of Donald Trump.

 

In the end, Blair’s renunciation of rejoining the EU will mean a significant setback for that cause, and his focus on AI and energy security is welcome. Yet the potential force of the essay is blunted by his refusal to apply the same scrutiny to his own record that he so generously doles out to his successors. If Blair wants his interventions to read more like statesmanship and less like self-justification, he must first take an honest look in the mirror.