• Home
• UK Politics
• World Politics
• Policy
• Media
• Lifestyle
• Sport
• Contributors
• Topics

Tony Blair is the Scar the Labour Party Cannot Help Scratching

Dan Hodges says Ed Miliband will continue to be haunted by Tony Blair.

By Dan Hodges

2 Oct 2011, 16:36

The Boo. All the planning, all the speech writing all the spinning. The 2011 Labour party conference will be remembered for that one instant when Ed Miliband tried to quietly move on from New Labour, only to see elements of his party pounce upon its twitching corpse and parade it round the ACC Conference Centre.
 
Labour’s inability to leave our Blairite past to the pages of the numerous ministerial memoirs charting its ascent and decline has defined the past week, and may ultimately define Ed Miliband’s leadership. There was no need to let the name Tony Blair pass his lips. His presence did not hang heavy of this conference. The release of the Purple Book, seen by some as a book of remembrance as much as a policy prospectus, had passed with relatively little fuss.
 
But Tony Blair is the scar the Labour party cannot help scratching. “I am my own man”, Ed Miliband told his cheering delegates. But he isn’t. And he knows it.
 
Supporters insist Miliband’s decision to name check his predecessor was purely pragmatic. “It’s just time to move on”, said one source, “Next year there are going to be people voting who weren’t even born when Tony Blair was first elected Labour leader. It’s a new era. And we can’t hope to lay claim to it unless we leave the past behind”.
 
A simple, and understandable, desire to move forward may well be the current Labour leader’s primary motivation for trying to lay the spectre of his predecessor to rest. But there is more to it than that. This week the fixation with Tony Blair moved beyond the political to the psychological.
 
“It’s been there for some time”, said one self-confessed Blairite. “I saw it during the leadership election. I was at events where I literally saw people booing Tony’s name and then stand and applaud when Gordon’s came up. It goes deep”.
 
It manifests itself partly through paranoia. One Ed Miliband ally recently described how he saw the remaining Blairites as one of the vested interests their man had to destroy. Another identified them as one of the obstacles to Miliband ripping up the political rulebook. A third confessed he still saw some Blairite  shadow cabinet members as a direct threat to Miliband’s leadership.
 
Not all those fears are necessarily misplaced. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you, and there’s no doubt that there are some members of the shadow cabinet who don’t believe their leader has what it takes to seize the ultimate prize. But in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal even his harshest internal critics had resigned themselves to his tenure lasting till at least  the next general election.
 
Self-preservation is not the reason Ed Miliband felt the need to confront the legacy of Blairism. Anger, however, may well be.
 
Not that Miliband himself feels bitterness towards Blair. But he senses it coursing through the veins of his party. “Yes, I still hate him”, a moderate, centrist party member told me yesterday. “It’s the betrayal of hope. The policy agenda, which he just stole from the Tories. And the way he treated the party. He was constantly defining himself against us. He’s a bastard”.
 
The ferocity of that response is not uncommon. Nor can it solely be attributed to the Armageddon of Iraq. I well recall the perverse relief felt  by  many, including if I’m honest myself, that there was finally a tangible issue around which we could build our disillusionment with Blair’s leadership.
 
But that anger does not reside in isolation. It has a partner. Guilt.
 
On Wednesday evening I met up with two former senior special advisors from the Blair years. At the time they had not been mere supporters. They were ultras. Members of New Labour’s Praetorian Guard.
 
Today it is not possible to find two harsher critics of Tony Blair. Both had worked closely on Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign, and both passionately supported his vision for his party. But to them it was more that a campaign. It was an act of atonement. “When I look back at that time the thing I remember most is that feeling of absolute certainty”, said one, “Our devotion to Blair was just so over the top. We were an embarrassment”.
 
Labour conference has ended. It has been a terrible one for Labour and its leader. The abiding impression is of Ed Miliband leading his party rapidly to the left, whilst  his troops march willingly and unquestioningly  behind.
 
That impression has been cemented by one  instant. The Boo.  It has fixed in the mind’s eye of both the  public and commentariat, in a way no photo call or press conference ever could, that Labour as a movement is preparing to turn its back on political moderation and success.
 
It’s the wrong impression. The Boo was not an overt political act. It was a reaction. An emotional spasm. A reflection of a party not trying to distance itself from the public, but come to terms with its own past.
 
But that will make no difference. Ed Miliband tried to move on from New Labour. He failed. Tony Blair will now haunt him till the bitter end.