As prime minister, Tony Blair oversaw a few hundred Downing Street staff and one country. Sixteen years later, he is now responsible for more than 800 staff who help advance his policies in nearly 40 countries.
Since leaving No 10, the former prime minister has arguably become more powerful thanks to the work of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), which has exploded in size and revenue during the last few years. Its accounts show it made over $81m (£65m) in revenue in 2021, a 78% increase on the previous year.
With the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, increasingly turning to Blair as an unofficial source of advice, the influence of both the former prime minister and his institute could soon grow further.
Benedict Macon-Cooney, the institute’s chief policy strategist, said: “Other organisations around the world help governments think about delivery, but not with the same degree of expertise that we are able to offer thanks to the former prime minister.”
Blair himself told the Financial Times: “I want [the institute] to be entrepreneurial, agile and give governments good solid advice,” adding that he wanted the TBI to outlive him.
Critics, however, accuse Blair of using the institute as a vehicle to advance his own ideological views and the causes of some of its corporate backers.
A spokesperson for the leftwing campaign group Momentum said: “It’s deeply worrying to hear of the Tony Blair Institute’s extensive influence in Keir Starmer’s Labour.
“This is an organisation bankrolled by billionaires, which continues to advise and take money from the murderous Saudi government. What’s worse, its solutions reflect these corporate interests, with Tony Blair laughably claiming that Britain’s economic crisis is a result of too much tax and spend.”
After leaving Downing Street, Blair pursued a handful of different commercial and philanthropic activities. They included advising the US bank JP Morgan for $1m a year, and the insurance group Zurich for a reported six-figure salary.
It was his profit-making consultancy work abroad, however, that was to attract the fiercest criticism, such as helping the Saudi-owned company PetroSaudi do business in China for a monthly salary of £41,000 plus a 2% commission.
In 2017, Blair decided to close all his commercial and philanthropic activities, including the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, the Tony Blair Sports Foundation, the Tony Blair Governance Initiative and Tony Blair Associates. In their place one organisation was created,to be known as the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
The new organisation would use money from donations and commercial activities including advising governments around the world to fund philanthropic and policy analysis work. As a whole, the organisation is not run for profit and Blair does not receive a salary.
The institute has since grown steadily in terms of its finances and influence. It works around the world, including the UK, the US, eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
Last week the TBI recruited the former Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin, who said upon joining: “I believe that I can serve those voters [in Finland] well and maybe even better in the new assignment.” Marin, Blair and Starmer all spent the weekend in Montreal as part of a gathering of centre-left leaders and former leaders from around the world.
In its size and scale the institute resembles less a British thinktank and more the kind of globe-straddling foundation that US presidents sometimes set up after leaving office – a UK version of the Clinton Foundation. One person who knows the institute well recently described it as a “McKinsey for world leaders”.
One of its most controversial clients is Saudi Arabia, which the TBI continues to advise even after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Blair told the FT: “If we don’t work in any country where there are problems of human rights, you’re going to be working with a small list of countries.”
Macon-Cooney, who worked for the TBI in Rwanda advising the country’s authoritarian president, Paul Kagame, said: “The judgement that we make with any country is where do we think it is going. In Rwanda there is a very, very deep focus on trying to promote stability and economic growth.”
The TBI came to the fore in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it released a series of policy proposals that often foreshadowed what the government would do. They included rolling out widespread rapid testing and reducing the interval between the first and second vaccine doses in an attempt to get people fully vaccinated more quickly.
The policy area that underpins much of what the institute does, however, is technology. Blair’s belief that governments can cut their costs by embracing cutting-edge technology is promoted by the institute as a whole, which advocates for countries to roll out digital identification cards and spend heavily on artificial intelligence.
The institute also pushes for governments around the world to digitise their health records, an agenda that happens to tally with the corporate interests of one of its biggest donors, Larry Ellison.
Ellison, the co-founder of the technology company Oracle who has ties to Donald Trump, has long been a strong supporter of the TBI. Awo Ablo, one of the TBI’s four directors (and its former executive director for external relations) is a director of Oracle.
Ellison gave the TBI $33.8m through his philanthropic foundation in 2021 and promised another $49.4m in 2022. That was also the year Oracle bought the healthcare IT company Cerner for $28bn.
Macon-Cooney insists the institute’s policy positions are not shaped by its donors’ corporate interests. “There is no conflict of interest, and donations are ringfenced,” he said.
He did say, however, that the TBI helped to put public officials in touch with companies it believed could help them deliver the changes for which it advocated. “Sometimes the state is the best way to do things, but if we are look around and see private providers which would be better at helping with reforms, then we will say so,” he said.
Starmer enter Downing Street next year as only the second Labour leader to have won an election in half a century. As he prepares for the prospect of government, he is becoming closer to the first.
Starmer promoted a series of figures from the Blairite wing of the party in his recent reshuffle, including Liz Kendall as shadow welfare secretary and Pat McFadden as his election coordinator. McFadden’s wife Marianna was also recently recruited from the TBI to help plan the election campaign, a route many in Labour expect others will soon follow.
One Labour source said: “If you think the TBI is influential right now, just wait until we get into power and have to recruit half our staff from there.”
• This article was amended on 19 September 2023. An earlier version said that Awo Ablo was Oracle’s former director of external relations. She held that role at TBI and is a director of Oracle. Also a detail about the foundation of TBI was clarified.
