Rishi Sunak sounds like Tony Blair and ‘is closer than you think to Gordon Brown’… LEO MCKINSTRY and ANDREW PIERCE on how New Labour has wormed its way back into Downing Street
Battered by economic turmoil, record-breaking unpopularity and internal divisions, the Conservatives appear to be heading towards electoral calamity.
The party’s increasingly dysfunctional nature was recently illustrated by an embarrassing episode involving the Tories’ Scottish leader Douglas Ross.
Widely regarded as a lightweight, Ross thought he had pulled off a masterstroke with his appointment of political operative Craig Paterson as a senior aide.
The highlight of Paterson’s impressive CV was his claim to have worked for top figures in the Scottish Labour movement, including the former Secretary of State Jim Murphy. ‘Craig arrives with extensive knowledge of Scottish politics, having once been a key part of Scottish Labour’s operations,’ boasted Ross.
But it was a fantasy. The truth was exposed by Jim Murphy himself, who said that he had ‘never knowingly met this guy, nor employed him ever’. The Scottish Tories were forced hurriedly to withdraw the job offer, admitting that ‘the web of lies concocted by this man is incredible’. Yet they had fallen for the fairy tale without doing any proper checks.
Apart from exposing the naivety and incompetence of Ross’s political machine, the other lesson of this laughable saga is that many Conservatives still cling to the belief that Labour maintains a superiority in organisation and policy making.
Despite the reality that Labour have been in the wilderness for 12 years, much of that attitude still lingers today — indeed, it is reflected in the adoption of New Labour strategies, methods and even the recruitment of New Labour personnel by Rishi Sunak’s government
Despite the reality that Labour have been in the wilderness for 12 years, a host of figures in the Tory high command continue to be mesmerised by the record of the last Labour government, particularly Tony Blair’s trio of electoral victories from 1997 to 2005.
As Prime Minister, David Cameron reportedly described himself as ‘the heir to Blair’, while his Chancellor George Osborne privately referred to Blair as ‘the Master’.
And, extraordinarily, much of that attitude still lingers today — indeed, it is reflected in the adoption of New Labour strategies, methods and even the recruitment of New Labour personnel by Rishi Sunak’s government.
While Douglas Ross’s new pick for his office may have been based on an illusion, the Government’s embrace of the architects of New Labour is only too real.
In his recent Autumn Statement the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced the crucial appointment of two figures who came to public prominence during the Blair era.
One was of Patricia Hewitt, the highly controversial, scandal-hit former Cabinet Minister and Left-wing campaigner, to head a review of reform in the NHS, with a focus on the effectiveness of newly created ‘integrated care boards’, which replaced clinical commissioning groups.
Never the most popular front-bencher because of her condescension, she was said by one Labour MP to be ‘the woman who put the pat into patronising’.
At the same time, Hunt hired Sir Michael Barber — an education expert and the former head of the No 10 Delivery Unit under Tony Blair — to scrutinise the Government’s skills programme.
With his love of data management, Sir Michael was once dubbed ‘the control freak’s control freak’ but he enjoyed the rare distinction of getting on with both Blair and his notoriously embittered rival, Gordon Brown.
After Hunt’s announcement of Hewitt’s return, one disgruntled Tory said: ‘Why on earth are we appointing a discredited Labour politician to lead a review of the NHS? We never learn. We constantly appoint opponents to do reviews which are then used to attack us.’
No such distance seems to be apparent in Hunt’s relations with Blair, however, as was demonstrated in January 2021 when the two men held an online discussion, organised by the Chatham House think tank, about ‘the future of liberal democracy’
But hiring Hewitt and Barber is just part of a wider pattern of New Labour’s heavy influence on the Government. Recently, it emerged that Blair himself has been helping behind the scenes to find a workable solution to the problem of the Northern Ireland protocol.
One diplomat explained Blair ‘does not agree with the Government on every point but he had certainly been a helpful voice’.
Revelling in his role as elder statesman, Blair also had secret talks at the height of the Covid pandemic with then Health Secretary Matt Hancock, pushing for mass testing and the roll-out of vaccines.
In the end, Hancock grew wary of Blair, fearing that the former Labour leader was trying to pass off Government ideas as his own, and called a halt to their talks.
No such distance seems to be apparent in Hunt’s relations with Blair, however, as was demonstrated in January 2021 when the two men held an online discussion, organised by the Chatham House think tank, about ‘the future of liberal democracy’.
In the 50-minute talk, they covered the NHS, Artificial Intelligence, expansion of universities, welfare fraud and China.
One Whitehall source said: ‘Jeremy has long been a huge admirer of Tony Blair. You could see it in the Chatham House conversation. It was a real love-in.
‘When Blair was critical of Brexit, there was no push back from Jeremy.’ (Hunt is a Remainer.)
The bond between them was further shown in a burst of sentimentality at the end of the conversation, when Hunt’s ten-year-old son asked Blair: ‘Do you think climate change will be over by the time I’m your age or do you think that the world is going to end?’
But it is not just Hunt who seems in thrall to New Labour. In tone, delivery and even content of his speeches, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak can sound very like Blair. Not only that, the former Chancellor has surprisingly warm relations with the famously prickly Gordon Brown.
Installed at the Treasury from February 2020, Sunak liked to call his predecessors for advice, but the one with whom he developed the strongest rapport was Brown.
The International Monetary Fund, the union with Scotland and the impact of the pandemic were among subjects they discussed. ‘They talked a lot more than people realised when Rishi was at the Treasury. They are closer than you think,’ says a Whitehall insider. Sunak was a Leave supporter in the 2016 Referendum, but some Euro-sceptics now question his commitment to the cause of British independence.
Their doubts are fuelled by factors such as last week’s speculation that the Government might seek to develop a new Swiss-style trade deal with the EU, and the recent appointment of arch-remainer Will Dry as a Downing Street Special Adviser.
But it is not just Hunt who seems in thrall to New Labour. In tone, delivery and even content of his speeches, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak can sound very like Blair. Not only that, the former Chancellor has surprisingly warm relations with the famously prickly Gordon Brown
Dry, a former Oxford student, was a founder of the anti-Brexit advocacy group Our Future, Our Choice and campaigned energetically for a second referendum.
In his words Brexit is ‘not democratically sustainable’.
One Tory activist said of Dry’s appointment: ‘What is No 10 thinking? He is desperate to stop Brexit. This will not build trust on the backbenches.’
That trust has been further weakened by the hiring of Patricia Hewitt, whose very name is synonymous with New Labour partisanship and political scandal.
Indeed with her chequered record, lofty and sometimes dismissive manner, and her attachment to progressive, interventionist dogma, it is hard to imagine anyone less in tune with the traditional spirit of conservatism.
In her role as General Secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) she became embroiled in a controversy that was to haunt her decades later. It was caused by the Council’s shameful sympathy for the sinister campaign outfit the Paedophile Information Exchange.
Founded in 1974, PIE sought to exploit Left-wing ideology to paint paedophiles as an oppressed minority who deserved support rather than punishment. Unbelievably, the NCCL not only allowed PIE to become one of its affiliate organisations in 1975, but the next year proposed that the age of consent be lowered to 14 and even ten ‘where the age of consent of a child could be proved’.
For good measure, the NCCL also urged that incest should be decriminalised ‘when committed between mutually consenting persons’. PIE stayed affiliated with the NCCL until 1983 when the bond was broken — not before Hewitt had expressed her outrage at the arrest of PIE chairman Tom Carroll for conspiring to corrupt public morals.
Hewitt eventually issued an apology for ‘having got it wrong’ over PIE and said she ‘took responsibility for the mistakes that were made’. But the shameful issue did not inhibit the upward trajectory of her career, which saw her serve in Blair’s Cabinet — and now advise the Tory Government.
As for the other New Labour recruit, Sir Michael Barber, he’s a former union official who masterminded the public sector reform programme under Blair, and for a time in the 1980s was chairman of the education committee at Hackney Council, then one of the notorious ‘loony Left’ authorities.
Will his appointment and Patricia Hewitt’s restore Conservative fortunes? It’s doubtful — because aping Labour is surely a sign of their desperate weakness.
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