As I sit opposite Sir Tony Blair in his private office at his Institute for Global Change in Fitzrovia, only 100 yards or so from David Beckham’s Studio 99 production company, I ask if Sir Keir Starmer is good enough to last two terms, or even three?
“Yes, of course, yes, he’s just beginning,” he snaps. “I said to someone the other day who was expressing anxiety about the Government, ‘When was the election? Was it July 4?’ Yes. I said, ‘Three months. I mean, come on. Give the guy a chance, he’s only just started!’”
The look he gives me when I have the temerity to ask about Starmer is the same one he gave me 20 years ago when I interviewed him at Downing Street and asked him if he’d read Piers Morgan’s diaries. “How on earth do you think I’ve got the time to read a book by Piers Morgan?” he said, incredulously.
What is his status report on the Starmer government, three months in?
“It’s all about whether they can deliver the plan they’ve got, whether these missions can be delivered or not,” says Blair. “It’s going to be tough, because of the environment they’ve inherited this time.”
Is Starmer a good leader?
“Well, I’m fully supportive of him, I want him to succeed.”
When I suggest the public hate the fact they accepted so many freebies from Lord Alli (whom Blair ennobled in 1998 as part of New Labour attempts to shake up the upper chamber), especially as they campaigned on a wave of sanctimony, he interrupts me.
“I’ve known Waheed for over 30 years. He’s never asked for anything from the Labour Party. I mean, he’s a highly successful entrepreneur, he supports the Labour Party, and one of the most decent people you could ever meet. I don’t want to get into all that. It’s just the way it is.”
What advice specifically would he give Starmer right now?
“It’s not my job to advise. He’s perfectly capable of doing it on his own.”
But you’ve just written a book for him, I say.
“No, I didn’t write the book for him, I wrote the book for leaders. And, by the way, the lessons of leadership are the same whether you’re running a country, a company, or coaching a football team. They’re the same lessons. So I’m not going to give him advice. I would give him support, which is probably more appropriate.”
The leader of leaders
Along with the other 200 or so world leaders, the Prime Minister could learn a lot by diving into Blair’s surprising new book, On Leadership. Essentially, it’s a kind of how-to business book for heads of state and has advice on everything from the difference between tactics and strategy, how to successfully marshal your troops, and how not to get bogged down by the glue of government.
Admittedly, there isn’t a chapter on the public perception of taking hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of unsolicited gifts from one of your biggest donors, but everything else is here. The former Labour leader and prime minister delivers a manual for good governance, the kind he wished he’d had upon winning his first general election back in 1997.
On Leadership is an often fascinating look under the political bonnet, and has generated largely positive praise from Blair’s brethren. “What this book captures about Blair is not just his mastery of the political arts, but his infectious optimism about politics itself,” says the former editor of the Standard, George Osborne. “It is the most practically useful guide to politics I have ever read.”
What would Starmer learn, then, from his book?
“I think the only thing that anyone will learn who’s coming into a position of leadership is that there are things to think about strategically that will help you govern better because part of governing is about creating the right systems around you,” says Blair. “A lot of leaders who come into power don’t necessarily think about becoming leader in government as an executive position. They think about it as political leadership, which it is, but you learn very quickly that to win an election you need to be the great persuader, but to govern you need to be a good chief executive. And it really is the skillset that is most commonly found in the private sector.”
If he has one piece of advice for Starmer it’s introducing identity cards, which he is convinced the Prime Minister will eventually do.
“In the end, they will explore it, because everybody should have an electronic health record where you have all your data in one place. Countries are digitising their passports, their driving licences. It’s not a method of control by government, it’s a way of having your own personal biometric identifier, which means you can do your private transactions, not just your public ones. I think this will happen in the end; it just depends how long it takes us to get there.”
He also thinks Starmer is doing the right thing regarding Brexit, by reconstructing a relationship with Europe.
“The British people are in a negotiation with themselves about this. I think most people, even if they would still vote for Brexit, and I think fewer people would, don’t think it has delivered what they were promised. In my judgment it never was going to. Therefore, there is an acceptance that it’s sensible for Britain to create a closer relationship with Europe.”
Blair is 71 and yet could easily pass for a man 10 years younger. Lean, alert and still possessing a seemingly innate ability to grasp a situation, a question or an environment immediately, he has almost lost the haunted look he appeared to adopt when he left office in 2007.
“I wrote the book because I think it’s a very odd thing that you have books about leadership in virtually every profession, but you don’t have one about government. Because people always treat government as if it’s just politics, whereas a lot of government’s about executive action, about implementation, about how you assemble the right team and devise the right policy, and you can learn lessons from what’s happened round the world.”
Political dilemmas
The book focuses almost exclusively on his own leadership — it is often hilariously self-deprecating: “I couldn’t have written it in 1997. The only job I ever had in government was prime minister.” — but its publication offers an opportunity to hear what he has to say about other world leaders.
Why had there been such a strong turn away from the Conservatives at the election?
“Because people thought they were chaotic and ultimately much more interested in their own internal fight than running the country. Starmer is the sixth prime minister in eight years. I mean, that’s a crazy way to run a country and I think people thought post-Brexit they just kind of fell apart as a government. Who was the most successful of those leaders? If David Cameron hadn’t had the Brexit referendum, he’d have probably been the longest-serving post-war prime minister.”
What about Boris? Blair has previously accused Boris Johnson of lacking any kind of coherent plan for dealing with the changes the country faced after Brexit, saying his government didn’t have a proper strategic plan for coping with leaving the EU, alongside the technological revolution and the transition to net zero. Today he appears somewhat more forgiving.
“There’s enough people having a go at Boris, I’m not interested in having a go at him myself.”
I didn’t ask you to.
“No, but it was pretty obvious what you were saying. I haven’t thought about reading his book, and while I’m a consumer of political biographies, not ones about myself. Or films. People ask me, ‘What did you think of The Queen as a movie?’ I said, ‘I’ve never seen it.’ I don’t think they believe me, but I haven’t.”
He is predictably withering about the state of the Conservative Party.
Tony Blair by numbers
1997: Blair wins the general election for Labour
43: The age he came to office: the youngest of any PM since 1812
419: Seats won by New Labour in 1997 — compared to 411 in the 2024 election
2007: Blair leaves office in the aftermath of the Iraq war
41: Per cent of British people think the Iraq war left the world a less safe place (YouGov)
6th: Most popular modern Labour politician — behind Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown (YouGov)
“The one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that the Conservative Party should return to the centre,” he says, “but I think it’s going to be hard. You require huge skill as a leader to take them there, because they’ll think they’ve got the Reform Party now as their biggest threat, and therefore the way of dealing with that is to try and do a certain amount of mimicry. When I was growing up and my dad was a Conservative, the Conservative Party was the default party of government. [Which is] one of the reasons why it’s so important that the Labour Party keeps itself based very much in the centre of British politics.
“The real problem for the Tories is people thought they lost the essence of what the Conservative Party used to stand for — governing. So for the Conservative Party, the single most important thing is they recapture that. But I don’t think they think that at the moment. They have got a heavy dose of ideology and that was never what they were about. I think even Thatcher would not have described herself as an ideologue. She would have seen herself in quite a traditional Conservative way, but just saying in the Seventies there were certain things that needed to happen for the country to be put on the right path. Then they’ve got this thing about Europe, which for 30 years has disoriented them, frankly. Turned them into an ideological party, when that was never their appeal. That’s my view, but I’m not a Conservative, so I may be 100 per cent wrong.”
If you speak to a lot of people who make geopolitics their business, they’ll tell you the world is more unstable than it’s been for 90 years, and that the existential narrative echoes that of the Thirties. Blair is unconvinced.
“I think about that a lot, because there are people whose opinions I really respect who say that’s true. I find it hard to believe, given the integration of the global economy today, because when people talk about this, they really mean China and America. I just find it hard to believe that either would allow a situation to develop in which they destabilised everything. On the other hand, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s reassertion of a kind of imperial leadership, does have a sort of early 20th-century ring to it.”
He is more emphatic when discussing Ukraine. “We should give Ukraine all the help we can, so that they can negotiate an end to the war, an end that doesn’t reward Russian aggression. It’s why we should be absolutely clearly standing with the Ukrainians. There shouldn’t be any doubt about it. But we do need to negotiate an end to this conflict and it won’t end like the First World War and the Second World War; it’s not going to be like that. There will be, in the end, a compromise.”
The Middle East solution
I ask Blair if he thinks the quality of leadership in the Middle East is contributing to the escalation of hostilities; he has visited the region an extraordinary 270 times since leaving office and so professes to “know the detail”.
“The main challenge in the Middle East is really about the battle between Islam, the religion, and Islamism, the political theology. It comes in part from Iran, which is using its proxies all over the Middle East to try and create instability, and from the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the Sunni version of Islamism.
“In the end there is a huge desire, I think, among large amounts of the people, particularly the younger generation, to just move beyond that debate and to end up with religiously tolerant societies and connected economies, and that’s what they need. And remain wedded to the notion that the only solution is obviously to have the two peoples living side by side in peace with the two states. But we’re a long way from that, I’m afraid.
“I’m a strong believer in Palestinian self-determination, the Palestinian state, but to achieve that, irrespective of who’s the Israeli leader, you’ve got to have a unified Palestinian politics, and it’s got to be unified in pursuit of the two-state solution, peacefully. And the truth is Palestinian politics has been really anchored at this split between the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and the Hamas government in Gaza. And in those circumstances, it’s very hard to see how you get the coherence that allows you to make peace. But, anyway, we could do a whole interview on that one.”
What else do I glean from this hour with Blair?
That he never considered properly embracing the private sector after leaving office, occasionally misses being prime minister, thinks Kamala Harris is tough and smart but has no idea if she’ll win. That he worked successfully with the previous Trump administration, and wishes he’d recognised post-9/11 the challenge of trying to put democracy in countries where there were going to be too many forces obstructing that.
“Look, a lot of people want to see my government as having been about Iraq post-9/11, and nothing else. It suits parts of the Left and the Right to say that. But the truth is the day I left in 2007, we had a strong economy, improving public services, falling crime. We’d done a constitutional reorganisation of the country, including the Good Friday Agreement, we did the first minimum wage, we did social legislation, we won the Olympic bid that brought the Olympics to London, and it was two dollars to the pound.”
The fundamental thing about On Leadership, and indeed Tony Blair in 2024, is that in politics nothing surprises him any more. Well, almost. If there’s one thing that fascinates him it’s the fact his old press secretary Alastair Campbell is now something of a political rock star, due to the success of the podcast he hosts with Rory Stewart, The Rest is Politics.
As we say goodbye, he looks aghast. “It’s incredible, I mean, him selling out the O2. I’m, well, amazed!” He is still shaking his head as he walks off to have his picture taken for The London Standard. “Alastair Campbell, selling out the O2! I mean!”
On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century, by Tony Blair, is out now (Cornerstone, £25)
