The Blairites are back - and they want to run Europe

Anne McElvoy
28 Oct 2009

Will he, won't he? Rarely has there been such a fuss over a job without the main candidate having even said he wants it.

Tony Blair, however, has always been jolly good at getting other people to do things for him.

Gordon Brown has nodded approval, David Miliband is spouting about the need for a major figure to do the job - and when the other leading contender comes from Luxembourg, there isn't a lot of competition.

Leading foreign policy figures are lobbying in Brussels for a revival of Brand Blair: Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair's most loyal and gifted adviser, has quietly rejoined his team.

Filming an item on his modus operandi for the BBC's One Show this week, its contributors reminded me of the readiness of people to take risks on his behalf, just because he asks them to do so.

His election agent John Burton recalls a smart young lawyer turning up in a North-East constituency just before the deadline for nominations, and, being Blair, he somehow swung a team of sceptical Geordies behind him.

This rest is history. Now the mature Blair has to pull off a similar trick on a grander stage.

Europe has too few figures these days who could define the new role of president of the European Council.

Mr Blair, for all his flaws, could. He has the contacts, the perseverance and the guile to make fractious partners work together. 

Notwithstanding the considerable impact on his finances (always an issue with the Blairs) and the mixed delights of a job in the maw of Brussels, he wants the next step in politics. "If he could run for American president," says one of his oldest political friends, "he'd do that as well."

So he has entrusted the job of making his case to a former aide, now Foreign Secretary, David Miliband.

The Blair-Miliband axis is a significant one,  because it stood the test of New Labour's fractured times. Miliband was the ex-PM's first policy chief.

Mr Blair duly urged his protégé to challenge Mr Brown when he was forced to step down, though Mr Miliband demurred, such was his terror of taking on Gordon.

Both men are ardent pro-Europeans, who regard the failure to challenge Brownite monetary Euroscepticism as one of the failures of their years at the helm.

So the man himself wants to fulfil a neglected part of the 1997 covenant, while his old sidekick also wants to establish himself as a major voice in Europe before voters call time on his present job next spring.

Mr Miliband might well, as rumoured, have an eye on the new European foreign minister's job, if his old boss doesn't get the presidency.

My guess is that he has another audience in mind, closer to home. Whatever can be said of the other candidates for Labour's tattered crown - Ed Balls, Jon Cruddas, Ed Milliband and possibly Alan Johnson or Harriet Harman - they have zilch experience of the outside world, negligible interest in foreign and security matters and barely know anyone who matters beyond Dover.

Mr Miliband has his own weaknesses. He still tends to argue defensively rather than winningly, and the contours of his politics are foggy. But he does understand Washington, Moscow, the Iranian dilemma and big power relations.

A Labour leader cannot afford to be entirely adrift of the big international debates or wholly parochial.

And in a future contest, he is set to receive Mr Blair's benediction to beef up his credentials with the Right of the party.

Many would rule Mr Blair out on grounds of his leading role in the Iraq war. The major bomb attack in Baghdad this week is yet another sign that its miscalculations never let him go.

That objection can only intensify domestically when the Iraq inquiry begins work later this month.

It has not so far, however, been a central consideration for Mr Blair's main backers in the EU.

They care more about who can give the institution a purpose, amid the Babylon of its 27 members, and the confusion over what its role is to be, once the Lisbon Treaty is established.

For a man who pursued one of the most divisive foreign policy decisions in recent history to set about the task of crafting a united foreign and security policy, is a paradox.

Is it any less absurd, though, than entrusting such a task to a compromise candidate from a small nation? This is a test of how serious the EU really is about its own grandiose intentions.

The most violent opposition comes not from Blair's traditional anti-war opponents but from the Conservatives.

Having earlier declared they were "relaxed" at the prospect of President Blair, they have become near-hysterical in their opposition to a Tony revival, signalling that support for it would be seen as a "hostile act".

That shift has been driven largely by William Hague and Liam Fox, a powerful new alliance in shadow cabinet, who have convinced David Cameron that he has a lot to lose from having an old PM as king across the water.

That Mr Cameron has taken this bait shows how scared of Mr Blair the New Tories still are and how edgy the leadership is about the prospect of him casting a long shadow from Brussels. 

Mr Cameron knows his own European position is a terrible muddle. Lord Heseltine quite rightly  points out that positioning the Tories as a party of protest in the EU is a short-term strategy and will have to be adjusted once they are in power.

Is a new leader with a lot on his plate at home and a war in Afghanistan to manage really going to sit around unpicking clauses in the Lisbon Treaty?

The Tory leader thus risks ending up in the odd position, as a man who used to boast of being the "heir to Blair", of campaigning against a centre-Right (in EU terms), pro-market candidate who is more likely to take a sympathetic view of his government's position on many key issues of the day than anyone else in the race.  

Guessing the outcome of these things is a mug's game. Official Europe has more fault lines than the Grand Canyon and between small countries anxious to avoid being rolled over by "Old Europe", Iraq-avengers and the residual annoyance felt on the Continent with Britain for staying out of the euro, it looks like an uphill struggle for Tony the European.

I'm still sceptical about his chances but if he wants to shift the argument decisively, he must signal that he wants the role.

It is confusing and a touch arrogant to expect others to do the work while muttering about the Europeans needing to define what they want from the presidency.

It's a funny thing about Mr Blair: he's been gone from power for more than two years but he never quite goes away. I rather doubt he ever will.

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