What can Keir Starmer learn from Tony Blair? He hit the ground running in handling last month’s rightwing riots over immigration. He rolled the pitch for Rachel Reeves’s first budget. He initiated a post-Brexit era with Germany. It looked good. Starmer’s watchword was “change”. Yet he could not face seeing Margaret Thatcher’s portrait in Downing Street, the one predecessor who knew most about change in government.
Blair’s latest book, On Leadership, is full of ambiguous advice. He points out that prime ministers are by definition newcomers to the job. They are little better than apprentices or interns. He says they pass through three stages. They start by listening and learning. Then they think they know it all. Finally, they mature into judgment, but by then it is too late. They have become unpopular.
That hardly sits with Blair’s other advice, which is to get the tough issues out of the way fast. In retrospect, he says: “Go to it … I would have reformed earlier, faster.” In other words, make the biggest decisions when you are least competent to do so. That is exactly when Boris Johnson went for a hard Brexit, and Liz Truss for a half-baked budget.
Starmer was lucky in that his first test was on law and order, where he is clearly a professional expert. In future, as he faces a cascade of events, he will have to depend on advice. Here, Thatcher was scrupulous. She made sure her closest advisers were loyalists, but she left an independent civil service hierarchy in place to execute change. A leftwing senior official once told me: “We always knew exactly what she wanted us to do.” That is why she backed off from reforming the NHS in her first term and why she never privatised the railways (that was John Major).
Blair was different. He surrounded himself with cronies who failed to steer him clear of his grovelling to America, a failure that led him down the road to Afghanistan, Iraq and political disaster. Blair’s diminution of civil service independence – he set up a “delivery unit” to check on it and hired consultants – is undoubtedly among the chief causes of the current collapse of British public services.
Starmer’s team is like Blair’s: heavy with Labour party loyalists. Do they know how to use Whitehall? Do they have the experience to steer him through a looming crisis in border controls, Ukrainian missiles, NHS waiting lists or bankrupt councils? In overcentralised Britain, Starmer’s toughness in decision-taking will rely on two things: the advice he receives, and the capacity of those around him to execute these decisions.
Blair was effective in many ways. He was persuasive, popular and good in public. His mistakes were the outcome of internal battles – between aides, lobbies – and a fixation with the media. He often seemed ruled by the Daily Mail. Similar battles lie on the horizon for Starmer. He must face down defence firms that seduce civil servants with jargon. He must resist builders screaming for “infrastructure”. He must reform the chaotic funding of universities. He must know that half his $22bn Treasury black hole could be filled by ending just two eminently cancellable Tory white elephants, Hinkley Point and HS2.
The perennial dilemma for a new prime minister remains distinguishing between the decisions that need time and those that require urgency. We can only hope that, one day, old-man Starmer will not be another to tell his successor: “If only I had been a bit tougher earlier on.” The question still hovers over the Downing Street diary: are you part of history, or just a visitor?
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
