MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Wednesday, May 27th 2026 - 18:47 UTC
The text also targets the two main contenders to succeed Starmer in the leadership election being pressed for from the parliamentary base
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair intervened on Wednesday in the Labour Party's internal crisis with an essay of more than 5,600 words published on the website of his organization, the Tony Blair Institute, in which he demands that his party colleagues abandon ideological disputes, adopt what he calls a “radical centre,” and formulate a national project before contesting the party's leadership. “Trying to remove a prime minister before even knowing what new political direction is being proposed is not a way to behave,” the former Labour leader wrote, in an intervention that has received no public backing from the party's main figures.
Blair characterized Prime Minister Keir Starmer's victory in the 2024 elections not as a win on its own merits but as the result of being “an acceptable default option against a Conservative government that, in the view of citizens, had behaved unacceptably.” The text also targets the two main contenders to succeed Starmer in the leadership election being pressed for from the parliamentary base: former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, of the party's social-liberal wing, and the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, of the left wing. Blair describes both — Streeting as “a politician of enormous talent” and Burnham as “an important member of my government” — but argues that the debate they are staging “has an extraordinary retro flavour reminiscent of the twentieth century.”
