Blair slams 'vacuous' Brown in leaked note

A note from Tony Blair to an undisclosed recipient has made it's way into the hands of the Daily Mail in which Blair accuses Brown of 'hubris and vacuity'.

The former prime minister believed his successor had presided over a 'lamentable confusion of tactics and strategy', attacking Blair's record instead of building on it and failing to spell out an agenda for the future, according to the scathing note penned after last September's chaotic Labour party conference. Such tactics would not win the next election, he concluded.

The note leaked to the Mail on Sunday newspaper now threatens to trigger open warfare within New Labour, with its emergence so soon after David Miliband's broadside against the Prime Minister which was seen as part of an orchestrated plot to destabilise Brown by those loyal to his predecessor.

It came as Blair's close ally and former cabinet minister Stephen Byers accused Brown's government of trying to scale a massive electoral mountain with policies more fit for a 'Sunday afternoon stroll', in criticisms closely echoing Blair's own fears about the lack of a forward-looking agenda for New Labour.

Byers told The Observer it was time for big new ideas to capture voters' imagination and claw back marginal seats, adding: 'As David Miliband said, we need to remake our case afresh. That means not just obsessing about the question of Gordon Brown's leadership, but also considering the policies that will re-establish the coalition of support that has won Labour three elections.'

The Blairites do appear to have moved into open warfare against Brown now, and one has to admit that he has not made it very hard for them. There is no bold Brown agenda that the party can unite around and, unlike the claims being made by the Blair camp, he has simply continued the Blairite policies which please readers of the Daily Mail - recommission Trident, extend terrorist suspect detention to 42 days and ask unemployment benefit claimants to clean graffiti in order to earn their benefits - and do nothing to please the electorate in areas like Glasgow East which are utterly vital if Labour are to form the next government.

The Blairites have obviously decided that Brown is the problem rather than the policies which Blair promoted. They appear not to understand that what has changed the dynamic is the fact that David Cameron is playing a different game from Hague or Howard.

Cameron is not allowing the Labour Party's right wing policies to push him further to the right and render him and his party unelectable, which was essentially what Blair's game was. Cameron is openly accepting Labour policies and calling them what they are: Tory policies.

So Blair's friends, as I doubt that Blair himself was actually behind the latest leak, are doing real damage to the party by imagining that all that is needed is a change of leader. Labour needs to work out which constituency it best serves, as at the moment it's hard to work out what the party stands for, and this needs to happen before any change of leader.

This, indeed, is one of Blair's main points in the leaked memo:

The memo, in which Blair refers to himself in the third person as TB, complains that defining the new leader as a change from the Blairite era of spin meant that 'we dissed our own record... a fatal mistake if we do not correct it' and also that 'we junked the TB policy agenda but had nothing to put in its place'.

On this Blair and I are actually in agreement. For example, Brown moved British troops to Basra airport in Iraq in what appeared to be a clear break with the Blairite policy of always following Bush, but they have literally just hung about there boiling in the sun as Brown lacks the guts to put them on a plane and tell the US that we are out of there.

He hints that he will be the antithesis of Blair but on all the big issues he appears to be still be doing what Blair would have done. Or worse, refusing to follow Blairite policies but simply dithering... which is why we have British troops hanging around Basra airport.

Cameron is not the great new hope that Labour's intransigence is allowing the press to treat him as. He certainly is a lightweight. But, because Brown is failing to set out a clear Labour agenda, Cameron is getting away with simply not being Brown.

It's understandable why so many MP's think a change of leader is all that is needed here, but what is actually needed is a redefinition of policy in a way in which Labour's base can feel that we have a party which represents us.

So Blair's leaked memo, whilst damaging, actually contains the point that I have been making for weeks. Brown was right, in my opinion, to set out to put clear blue water between himself and Blairism, his problem is that he has not found anything to replace it with.

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Tags: Blair, Brown, leaked memo, New Labour, Cameron, Conservatives