The Meaning Of Life Is Life Itself

This country has five living former Prime Ministers, but only one of them stalks it. If you are 34, then you are too young to have voted at a General Election at which Tony Blair was a candidate. You could now have a child of voting age, yet Blair was last elected half your lifetime ago. He has been out of office one and a half times longer than he was ever in, and he is now in his seventieth year.

But with the mostly brief exceptions of Iain Duncan Smith, Gordon Brown, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, every Leader of either party since 1997 has either been Blair or wanted to be him. After all, at every General Election of that period, Blair has either been or endorsed the Leader of the party that had ended up with the largest number of seats, such that that Leader has either become or remained Prime Minister. 

Therefore, in recent days, Blair's merest breath has changed Labour's Brexit policy back to the one that had been in the 2017 manifesto and which, had Keir Starmer not unilaterally abandoned it, would have prevented a General Election from being held in 2019. The next Leader of the Conservative Party, who will be the Prime Minister for the rest of this Parliament, will in all but name be Blair's personal choice.

With that much clout, then Blair should revisit his recent pronouncement to the effect that only women could get pregnant. There are those who would say that that might seem obvious to someone who had been born in 1953. But in fact it is obvious to anyone who has ever been born at all.

Blairites and general Labour Rightists of, it is true, a certain generation are robust on this subject, figures such as Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch, not to say Rosie Duffield, with even Wes Streeting dropping hints. As is almost everyone whom I know on the Old Left, and I know a lot of people on the Old Left. I can scarcely contain my excitement at being hours away from seeing them again for the first time since the pandemic. I say "Old", but some of them are in their twenties, and some of those were teenagers when I first met them in the heady days of Early Corbynism or even earlier. They have always held these views, just as several of them have always been pro-Brexit.

Gender self-identification has emerged entirely since the last Labour Government left office, and it has become the de facto policy of most or all government departments and agencies only since the end of the Coalition. Again, do the Tories whom you know have any truck with it? Yet here we are. In going along with it, Starmer manifests his dependence on some or other tiny faction, as alien to the Tony Blair Institute as it is to the Morning Star.

No doubt that has something to do with Pabloism. We who did not leave the Left before most people were born, and who flatter ourselves that we have been more than 10-a-penny newspaper-sellers in it, have always known about Starmer and Pabloism. But Blair has shown the heft to change even Starmer's previously sacrosanct and signature policy on Brexit. He should use that heft again here.