Ed Miliband may have politely told Tony Blair what to do with his advice about the direction of the Labour party, but the former Labour Prime Minister’s allies aren’t quite so keen to let his New Statesman piece disappear into the party recycling bin just yet. On today’s political programmes, they popped up to drive home their belief that Blair should jolly well be listened to, not ignored.
Tessa Jowell was so keen to make this point on Murnaghan that she managed to turn the discussion on Margaret Thatcher around to how much Blair had to offer politics twice. She said:
‘I think that he has a lot to give to British politics, he’s got a lot to give to the Labour party, and this goes to the central question of this discussion, which is how do parties manage the relationship where any intervention by, in our case, Tony Blair, is seen as unwelcome, unhelpful and all the rest of it, then I think that is destructive.
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