Mailwatch(ed) Forum

There is a sensible bit among the rubbish

...But Blair also suggested it was a mistake for others in the party to seek to remove Starmer as prime minister, saying: “The Labour party is playing with fire; or, more accurately with its future, and that of the country. Whether there is a leadership change or not is irrelevant if it doesn’t start with a policy debate.

“Trying to force the prime minister out, before we know what policy direction we’re bringing in, is not a serious way of conducting ourselves.”

Blair attacked Burnham and his fellow leadership contender Wes Streeting – who has often been cast as a Blairite but rejects the label – for ideas on tax and spending that he said had been rejected by serious governments. He said it was a “perennial delusion” that the party should move left while losing seats to the right, saying it was “dangerous to do it in government”...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... nald-trump

That quote aside, why is it that when in power Blair was a much better PM than Major, while in retirement Major generally talks sense and Blair spouts thesort of bollocks Badenoch would be proud of?

Is replacing Net Zero with drill baby drill really a coherent long term strategy, Tony?
Fresh from his calls to help bomb Iran, Blair suggests we move closer to Trump. Like Thatcher in 1989 and unlike Mark Carney in 2026, Blair sounds like he doesn't fully comprehend how the tectonic plates of geopolitics are reforming.

Yug wrote: ↑Wed May 27, 2026 6:43 am why is it that when in power Blair was a much better PM than Major, while in retirement Major generally talks sense and Blair spouts thesort of bollocks Badenoch would be proud of?

Blair was always an ersatz Tory, he just hid it well. That, or his wealth has corrupted him.

Either way, he's a cunt.

Like the Tory Party, Blair appears to have forgot how to shape shift and adapt to changing landscapes. Just heard a talking head suggest Andy Burnham is the person that possesses the political skills that used to make Conservative leaders (and Tony Blair) electable.

As far as I'm concerned, this whole business is a fuss about nothing and changing leader will be disastrous.

Burnham and his Manc Mafia should stick to running Manchester and fuck off out of it.

As for Streeting... he can just fuck off, along with Philips and her "gobby Brummie" shtick. In the latter's case, as someone else has said, she's her own worst enemy and it undermines the good she has done.

The only possible conclusion to draw from Blair's public cogitations, it seems to me, is that he thinks we should simply hand government straight back to the Tories, preferably with Rishi Sunak back in Downing Street.

I think he can safely be ignored, and should be.