Kemi Badenoch has told Sir Tony Blair not to waste his time trying to persuade Labour to change course, using an open letter published in The Times to bat back his latest intervention in the party’s direction. The Conservative leader said the former prime minister should back the Conservatives at the next general election if he wants serious change.
The exchange has landed now because Blair’s 5,600 word essay reopened an argument about where Labour is heading under Sir Keir Starmer. In it, Blair said the government had no coherent plan for the country and had introduced policies that held back business, while Badenoch replied that there is only one show in town if the aim is to increase Britain’s economic and military strength.
Blair, who won three general elections, also argued that changing Labour leader would make little difference unless the party first held a serious policy debate. He suggested that could include changes to welfare and parts of the net-zero agenda, including rules that prioritise clean energy over cheaper energy. Starmer has defended his decisions, but the wider row is now about whether Labour’s current direction can withstand pressure from its own critics.
Badenoch said Blair was right to call for Labour MPs to focus on a proper political project, but argued he was still wasting his time trying to fix the party from the outside. She told him not to expect Labour to change and said those looking for a serious shift should vote Conservative instead. Her message was blunt: the Blairite legacy, she said, has left the whole country run by HR, with Labour junking its best ideas and championing its worst.
That attack did more than reject Blair’s essay. It also took aim at his record in government, including on devolution and the impact of legal reforms on migration, and it went to the heart of a question Labour has not been able to close down: what kind of party it wants to be before the next general election. Badenoch said Blair had failed to answer the bigger question of who Britain is as a nation, adding that culture matters and that people are more than economic units delivering growth.
The timing matters because Blair’s intervention arrived as Starmer faces pressure after poor election results and ministerial resignations, and because each new essay from a senior Labour figure keeps the argument alive rather than settling it. Badenoch’s reply makes clear she sees no room for Labour to reset under its current leadership, while Blair’s case is that the debate has to start with policy, not personalities. The next election will be the first real test of which argument voters believe.
