Email
Tony Blair did not quite leave No 10 with, as someone once wrote, the crowds wanting more. But the manner of his departure, as documented by the breathless emails revealed in the Guardian on Friday, still casts a shadow over the Labour party. The "coup" of September 2006 was the culmination of 12 years of mutual frustration between the occupants of Nos 10 and 11 Downing Street. The constant ding-dongs served neither man well. Blair left office thinking he could have done more had Gordon Brown not held him back. Brown took office thinking that all of Labour's political capital had been spent by Blair's cavalier approach to government. While as prime minister Brown was able to dominate the global stage as he tackled the financial crisis, he was unable on the home front to move on from positioning himself against his predecessor.
Looking back, the response from Team Blair to the letter-writing campaign to remove him from office was remarkably naive, co-ordinated through random email chains, conference calls and impromptu meetings. Karen Buck, a well-respected and decent backbencher, agreed to pull together a letter that tried to close the discussion by saying Blair would not last in Downing Street beyond the next party conference. It is now clear that Team Brown were effectively running a disciplined war-room with battle plans and an agreed sequence of attack. That it should have come to this is profoundly depressing.
It was also clear that Brown's team were convinced that the answer to every problem which Labour faced was that Blair should go. We, on the other hand, toyed with the idea of boosting other potential challengers to Brown. Curiously, whenever the issue was raised with the prime minister he was reluctant to engage.
The truth is that Labour's chances of retaining office in 2010 would have been enhanced if the mutual misunderstanding had been minimised. The collateral damage that Brown's reputation suffered as a consequence of the fatal attack he undertook in 2006 did not outweigh the benefits of extracting a public commitment from Blair to leave. This bias towards tactics over strategy that came to define Brown's time as prime minister can be seen during this ill-conceived episode.
In the fog of war these issues were neglected as the battle to preserve Blair's dignity or force his eviction raged. The sheer emotional energy these scrapes consumed does not reflect well on any of the participants – me included. Everyone who participated in them, from ministers, MPs, advisers and many more civil servants than is ever acknowledged, should reflect on what else could have been achieved if we weren't fighting. There is a fine line between loyalty and factionalism: the former is positive, the latter negative. Ironically, had the Tories been a more effective opposition these turf wars might have been seen as self-indulgent punch-ups rather than the fight to the death that they became.
Ed Miliband defeated David Miliband in 2010 by making Blair's political brand toxic and (very cutely) putting his brother on the wrong side of this argument. When Labour returns to office, as it could do in less than two years, Ed will no doubt consider how the errors of the last generation should not be repeated by his. Drawing a line in the sand with the nastier politics of the Blair and Brown era, but not the sound policies, would be my suggestion. Blair and Brown may have rowed, but they rowed themselves to three general election victories, rebuilt our public services, put themselves on the side of aspiration, boosted equality, and conceived a new global identity for Britain. Without the rows, one of them might still be in No 10 Downing Street.
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