Who does the Tony Blair Institute really work for?
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Since 2021, billionaire Larry Ellison’s personal foundation has donated or pledged at least £257m to the Tony Blair Institute.
This took the former PM’s think tank to a whole new level: it now has over 900 staff and is working across at least 45 countries.
But who, exactly, does it work for?
Will Lloyd is joined by Peter Geoghegan and May Bulman whose investigation into the TBI was published in The New Statesman this week
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The New Statesman |
| 0:02.0 | Since 2021, billionaire Larry Ellison's personal foundation has donated or pledged at least 257 million pounds to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. This took the former Prime |
| 0:22.3 | Minister's think tank to a whole new level. It now has over 900 staff and is working across |
| 0:28.5 | at least 45 countries. But who exactly does the TBI work for? I'm Will Lloyd and I'm joined |
| 0:36.5 | by Peter Gagan and May Boulman, |
| 0:38.8 | whose investigation with Lighthouse reports into the Tony Blair Institute |
| 0:42.5 | was published in the New Statesman this week, |
| 0:44.9 | ahead of Labour Party conference. |
| 0:46.7 | Welcome to the show. |
| 0:48.1 | Hi. |
| 0:48.5 | Hi, Will. |
| 0:49.5 | Hello. |
| 0:50.4 | Now, just to kick off, |
| 0:52.7 | could you sort of tell us what the purpose of this investigation was |
| 0:55.7 | and how it kind of worked mechanically? |
| 0:58.4 | Sure. |
| 0:59.8 | Yeah, so we kind of became interested in what TBI was doing. |
| 1:04.3 | Well, I mean, Lighthouse has been looking into kind of tech and AI accountability for a couple of years now. |
| 1:09.1 | And we sort of noticed that TBI reports that they were |
| 1:12.4 | putting out regularly were very tech focused. And we also become aware of the funding that TBI was |
| 1:19.9 | getting from one particular billionaire who has a big tech company, Larry Ellison, and we were interested to see kind of how |
| 1:29.2 | his funding, how his money coming into the organisation was influencing and affecting what they |
... |
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