Mick Hartley

On Friday I mentioned Tony Blair's latest intervention, this time on the trans debate, and noted how unwelcome his views are, as ever, with the leadership contenders. Andrew Rawnsley here expands on the Labour Party's extraordinary disdain – hatred even – for their only successful election winner in recent times.

In the most recent TV hustings between the remaining contestants for the Labour leadership, the trio were asked to name the Labour leader of the past 50 years whom they most admired. I am guessing that the producers set the time limit to exclude Clement Attlee in the hope that this would stop the contenders from selecting the easy Labour crowd-pleaser. The Corbynite continuity candidate, Rebecca Long-Bailey, picked Attlee regardless, not knowing or conveniently forgetting that the postwar Labour prime minister had a reciprocated hatred of the sectarian left, equipped Britain with nuclear weapons, fought wars and would loathe the politics of Jeremy Corbyn. Lisa Nandy swerved the choice of best leader by replying: “I’m hoping we’re about to elect her”, which was cheeky or vainglorious, according to taste. Sir Keir Starmer made the rather unfashionable pick of Harold Wilson “because he got the party to unite behind him”. The former DPP needs to brush up on his Labour history. There are things to be said in favour of Wilson, but his governments were not characterised by blissful harmony.

None of the contenders selected Tony Blair, the only person to have won an election for Labour since 1974. And he ruefully remarks that he will not be publicly revealing which of the leadership contestants he is going to vote for lest it “damage” their chances. When pollsters put a similar best leader question to Labour members, Mr Corbyn, the two-time election loser who smashed the party’s parliamentary representation down to its lowest level since 1935, was the activists’ number one. Tony Blair had the worst favourability rating, coming in below Jim Callaghan, who presided over the Winter of Discontent that ushered in 18 years of uninterrupted Tory government, below Michael Foot, who led Labour into the catastrophic “suicide note” election of 1983, and even below Ramsay MacDonald. […]

The most extreme exhibitions of this pathology are to be found on the hard left. Zarah Sultana, the Corbynite MP for Coventry South who introduced Ms Long-Bailey at her campaign launch, used her first speech in the Commons to denounce “40 years of Thatcherism”, in a breath dismissing the 13 years of Labour government between 1997 and 2010 as no different to the Tory governments that had preceded and succeeded it. The introduction of the minimum wage, the Human Rights Act, the use of tax and benefit changes to redistribute from the rich to the less affluent, the elimination of pensioner poverty, advances in equality on many fronts, massive investment in public services and the many other progressive achievements of the New Labour era, most implemented in the teeth of fierce Tory opposition, all this was, in Ms Sultana’s considered opinion, indistinguishable from Thatcherism.

A slightly more nuanced version of this attitude has been pervasive in the leadership contest. The contenders are habitually much readier to say what they didn’t like about the New Labour years than they are to find things to celebrate about the party’s longest stretch in power. […]

Is anyone listening to Mr Blair’s advice that Labour requires “head-to-toe renewal”? Outside the party, he still has an audience. He is correct to contend that much of the public are “willing us to succeed” at the challenge of becoming an opposition capable of being a “strong alternative” to the Tories. Within his party, I am sure he knows those willing to listen to him are in the minority.

It is a significant and illuminating aspect of Labour’s tragedy that its only triple election winner has become the embodiment of the chasm between the party and the voters. When the public are asked to rate recent Labour leaders, they don’t put Jeremy Corbyn anywhere near the top of their hit parade. Funny that. The voters, not sharing the perverse left’s preference for failure over success, place Tony Blair first.

The explanation, surely, is that the Labour Party is now the hard left. The fringe Stop-The-War campaigners and the like – whose very raison d'etre was a hatred of Blair – have now seized control. Whether the old centre left party of Attlee, Wilson, and Blair can ever be resurrected is very much an open question – but I'm not holding my breath.