The media have managed to turn Tony Blair’s essay into a leadership story, because of course they have. Westminster sees a former prime minister criticise a current one and immediately reaches for the ceremonial dagger. It is much easier than reading the argument.
But Blair did not really say “Starmer must go”. He said something more awkward, and rather more important. He said Labour has no coherent plan.
That is not the same thing.
In fact, he specifically warned against removing Starmer before deciding the policy direction. Which, inconveniently, is the bit much of the coverage has treated as small print. The headline version is assassination. The actual argument is strategy.
And this is the point I keep coming back to. People talk as if Starmer can simply wake up one morning, stride into No 10, slap the desk, and announce a new direction for the country. As if the prime minister is the managing director of Britain plc, and the rest of the state is just waiting for a briskly worded memo.
It does not work like that.
He can change the slogan by lunchtime. He can have a new lectern by teatime. He can probably find a backdrop with the word “renewal” on it before anyone has finished microwaving soup in the Cabinet Office. But changing the actual strategic direction of a government is rather different.
That needs policy. It needs money. It needs the Treasury. It needs the Cabinet. It needs parliamentary discipline. It needs the party not to start chewing its own ankle in public. It needs a plausible electoral coalition, which is slightly harder now that Brexit has taken the old map, folded it into a hat, and thrown it into a canal.
And here is the bit people keep missing. Many of the levers Starmer would need have already been removed, weakened, rusted solid, or buried under events no British prime minister could simply wish away. Some of that was political choice. Some of it was public choice. Some of it was the brute arrival of crisis.
The Tories inherited a country still carrying the damage from the financial crash, then chose austerity as a governing doctrine. The electorate then endorsed Brexit, sold as control but delivered as friction across trade, labour supply, investment and the public mood. Covid was not chosen. Ukraine was not chosen. Global energy shocks were not chosen. But the condition of the country when those shocks arrived was not an act of God. It was the product of years of underinvestment, short-term politics and pretending that resilience was an optional extra.
So when people say “Starmer should just change direction”, one has to ask: with what?
The public wants better public services, lower taxes, controlled immigration, higher wages, cheaper housing, secure borders, faster growth, lower bills, less debt, and no visible disruption to anything they personally enjoy. Fair enough. I would also like a Triumph GT6 that does 60 mpg, never rusts, and comes with an E-Type parked inside it.
But politics is not a menu where you tick all the pleasant boxes and send the bill to someone unpopular. If you vote for fourteen years of managed decline, austerity, Brexit friction and performative sovereignty, then watch the world add Covid, war, energy shocks and inflation on top, you cannot be astonished that the next prime minister finds half the controls missing from the dashboard.
This is where Blair is both useful and limited. He is right that Labour lacks a coherent governing story. He is right that changing leader without deciding what Labour is actually for would be court politics dressed up as renewal. But he is also a man who won elections before Brexit smashed the landscape. His map is not useless, but it is not current either.
The centre he dominated no longer exists in quite the same form. Scotland changed. The Midlands and North changed. The graduate vote changed. The Brexit divide cut through old party loyalties like a badly supervised angle grinder. You cannot simply reboot New Labour in a country that has spent the last decade being reformatted by austerity, Brexit, Covid, Ukraine, energy shocks and the faint whiff of Boris Johnson’s decorating arrangements.
So yes, Blair has added something useful. He has pointed at the hole in the middle of Starmerism. But he has not filled it. He has mostly reminded us that there is a hole, that it is quite large, and that in his day holes were managed with more confidence and better tailoring.
The real question is not whether Starmer stays or goes. The real question is what Labour becomes next.
If it moves right, it risks losing its base and younger voters. If it moves left, it risks frightening business, the Treasury and half the press into clutching the furniture. If it moves closer to Europe, the Brexit wound reopens. If it avoids Europe, the economic drag remains. If it promises public service repair without serious tax reform, it is pretending. If it promises growth without explaining where it comes from, it is doing motivational speaking in a slightly better suit.
That is why the leadership story is so shallow. It treats politics as casting. New face, new energy, new beginning. Wonderful. But if the script is still unfinished and the plot makes no sense, changing the lead actor only gets you a different person looking worried in front of the same collapsing scenery.
Blair has not called for Starmer to go. He has done something more irritating. He has said that Labour cannot solve its problem by changing the wrapping paper.
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