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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm

Oscar Edmondson, I'm joined today by James Heel and Rachel Wolfe, founding partner at Public

First and the author of the 2019 Conservative Manifesto.

So she knows a thing or two about constructing and communicating a political vision, which has been one of the big topics in Westminster this week.

Tony Blair's 5,000-word essay on What's Wrong with Labor has prompted West Streeting Andy Burnham and now Keir Starma to set out their visions for the country. So we thought we'd take them each in turn. But James, can you just start by giving us the broad strokes of Blair's intervention this week? Who's welcomed it and who it's rubbed up the wrong way? Sure. So Tony Blair has written a 5,000 word essay published on his Institute's website. And this is very much him reprising his role as the Cassandra of the Labour Party, earnestly desperately trying to tell his party truths that they do not want to hear and will not listen to. It's the first time he's intervened in a Labour leadership race in 11 years. The last time, of course, was Jeremy Corbyn, which the immediate poll after that showed that it had led to more people in the Labour Party voting for Corbyn than before. So we wait to see how his result does. But basically his attempt

to try and influence the direction of the party. He is saying that this number of different

challenges, the Labour Party is just not fundamentally addressing here. He talks, for instance,

about the need for agenda to encourage the animal spirits of business. He also talks about

migration, which is something

we hear remarkably little from labour figures as we enter the summer with its usual expected

site of multiple boats arriving here. And so, for exactly what he does, he says,

the lot of labour problems started coming from when he left office, surprise, surprise,

2007, and that Labour basically pivoted left after that and

hasn't fundamentally tried to grapple with the issues actually face the economy and actually

retreated very much to its kind of safe space. He's very much an AI optimist, just an AI

will solve some of these problems. And he ended the sort of policy checklist at the end of his

essay talking about how they need to come up with a plan for the NHS, stop the small boats and sort of embrace a sort of any means necessary approach to that specific issue. But really, it's a plea to try and say that Labor shouldn't retreat to what he would consider it to be at sort of left-wing safe space and actually should engage with these issues in a way in which that does encourage business and deals with the truths rather than try and pretend that the world is something it can't be. So AI is a fact of life. It's going to be here today. And they can't wish away problems like that. Yeah, Rachel, just before we go on to the other essays that have been prompted as a result of this, I did want to ask, firstly, what jumped out to you? And secondly, what you think of the people who are suggesting that Tony Blair is effectively a Tory now? I'm afraid I was one of those people. Let me qualify that.

I think Tony Blair was basically always a Tory. And I think his great genius was to be the Tory who

managed to take over Labour, which is the reason he won three elections. And he was just a Tory overseeing

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