Tony Blair and David Cameron only faced each other for two years (2005-2007) as leaders of their respective parties, and the Labour and Conservative ranks were just as tribal then as they are now. Nevertheless, there’s little to choose ideologically between the two individuals.
David Cameron proclaimed himself as the “heir to Blair”, and refers to the former Prime Minister as “the master”. These aren't just empty platitudes; Cameron has been trying his very best to emulate Blair. Just as Blair sought to modernise the Labour Party upon his election as leader in 1994, Cameron pledged in 2005 to move the Conservatives closer to the centre ground and detoxify his party. Cameron hasn't quite had a symbolic ‘Clause IV’ moment, but his initial “hug a hoody” platform was an attempt to end “the nasty party” image. As Blair grappled with the trade union influence within the Labour Party, Cameron tried to tackle similar vested interests by saying that the Conservatives should “stop banging on about Europe”, although he has failed that test miserably. Furthermore, in order to try and shed left wing and right wing stereotypes in their party, both signalled departures, to a degree, from praising their predecessors. Blair notes “I specifically went out of my way to pay tribute in my own political heritage to Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge” as opposed to historical praise for the likes of Clement Attlee, whilst Cameron gave his best fence-sitting answer with “I’m certainly a big fan of Thatcher, but I don’t know if that makes me a Thatcherite”. You could be forgiven for almost thinking that they were in the wrong parties; Blair said of Thatcher that she was “undoubtedly a great prime minister” and “we needed the reforms of the Thatcher era”.
It shouldn't be such a surprise that the two are so similar. New Labour pledged to continue Thatcherism but “with a human face”, which in turn Cameron has had no such problem in following, albeit as a so-called “liberal Conservative”. However, it is not just symbolisms and metaphors that link the two men. For Cameron’s NHS reforms, think Blair’s 2006 NHS Act. For Theresa May’s attempts at increased surveillance, think “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Cameron’s gay marriage policy is a natural progression from Blair’s introduction of civil partnerships. In Tony Blair’s own words in his autobiography, he could easily be describing Coalition policy; “In my view we should have taken a New Labour way out of the economic crisis: kept direct tax rates competitive, had a gradual rise in VAT and other indirect taxes to close the deficit, and used the crisis to push further and faster on reform”. Add to this that under Blair’s premiership the top rate of tax never hovered above 40%; he would have approved of Cameron and Osborne’s decision to reduce the current top rate from 50% to 45%. The Conservative Party approved of the Iraq War (with David Cameron as an MP at the time), and on education Blair notes approvingly “David Cameron’s government continues my commitment to academies”. In the few areas where they differ, it is relatively piecemeal, such as with ID cards. Cameron is considerably more eurosceptic than pro-european Blair, but then again there are eurosceptic MPs within the Labour Party.
I may be stating the obvious, and few of the points above are stark revelations, but with this commentary on ideological pairings, dangerous assumptions can emerge. Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens is very likely to agree with me when it comes to placing Blair and Cameron in the same boat. However, his (and other figures on the right wing) rather misleading and baffling thesis is that they are both a part of a left wing social democratic conglomerate. This inevitably leads to attacks from left and right, of which both individuals have suffered. For those, like Hitchens, who curiously believe that Blair and Cameron are part of a social-democratic consensus, I will use a quote from Mrs Thatcher on what she thought her biggest achievement was; “New Labour”. Whether their parties liked it or not, Blair and Cameron pitched their tents on the centre-right end of the political spectrum, meeting there as Labour moved rightwards and the Conservatives moved slightly leftwards. Both have tried to present their respective governments as centrists, and coincidentally both were open to Coalitions with the Liberal Democrats to help achieve this goal. The Lib Dems in Coalition enable Cameron to stifle his right wing backbenchers to a degree, whilst Blair contemplated a Coalition with the Lib Dems even after his 1997 landslide, saying “from the off, I wanted to have them in the big tent”.
The final similarity is the Labour and Conservative Party’s (on the whole) desire to banish Blair and Cameron. Ed Miliband proclaimed “New Labour is dead”, and many Party members and activists were fed up with what they perceived (correctly, in my view) to be a rightwards drift from Blair, and similarly on the other end of the spectrum there are many backbench Tory MPs and members who are angry that Cameron is not doing enough to implement “true conservative values”. Despite this, they do still have admirers. There are still Blairite fans in the media such as Independent writer John Rentoul and Daily Telegraph contributor Dan Hodges, whilst Cameron at least still has the support of his cabinet. Whatever the splits, Blair still has a New Labour backing amongst certain MPs, and Cameron desperately still wants to emulate him and achieve a landslide victory. Blair may still be a heavily divisive figure in politics, but his election-winning mystique is such that not only is Cameron an advocate, but so too, secretly, is Ed Miliband.
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