A Rare and Unusual Intervention

Tony Blair's essay about what's gone wrong in the Labour Party has been widely read and discussed, and earned decent length ripostes from Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham, and Keir Starmer. The cage of Labour statecraft was well and truly rattled. Still, if you've read one Blair essay you've read them all. There was nothing new here that he hasn't already said in a thousand-and-one other rare and unusual interventions. Blair is a massive fan of ChatGPT and its like, but even he doesn't need to engage their services when a cut and paste from his archives does the job. Blair was right about one thing, and that's the absence of strategic direction at the heart of this government. A point so obvious that even my cat knows it. But apart from that, the 5,700-word screed is interesting for one reason: for unapologetically laying out the empty world view of the ruling class. Something that "this shows Blair has moved to the right" takes fall far short of. In the piece, Blair says that welfare…