Blair ‘boasted he’d have won 2010 vote’ if Brown hadn’t forced him out
TONY Blair bragged in private before the 2010 General Election that he would have been on course to win it for Labour if Gordon Brown had not forced him out as prime minister, newly released emails show.
He made the claim days before the vote, with polls predicting a hung parliament and Mr Brown fighting for his political life.
It emerged in an email dated April 30, 2010, which was sent to Hillary Clinton by one of her closest advisers, Sidney Blumenthal.
Mr Blumenthal also gave a withering assessment of Mr Brown and described him as a ‘schlemiel’, or an idiot, who had become a ‘classic comedy straight man’ after a series of gaffes.
The emails were released as part of the latest batch from when Mrs Clinton was US secretary of state that are being made public because of a Freedom of Information request.
In the email, Mr Blumenthal told Mrs Clinton he was going to London ahead of the election the following week. He said he was staggered by the incident during the campaign in which Mr Brown was overheard referring to Labour supporter Gillian Duffy as a ‘bigoted woman’ after she had challenged him on immigration.
Mr Blumenthal wrote: ‘Gordon widely seen as schlemiel after ‘‘bigotgate’’ episode. He’s become a classic comedic straight man. I expect a bucket of paint to fall on him next time he opens a door. Still he maintains his dignity. Funny and sad and affecting all at once.
‘Spectacle aside, the chance of a hung parliament looms. Have been making the rounds. (Tony says in private he would have won – easy to say but probably true.)’
In public interviews Mr Blair has said only that he would have given David Cameron a ‘run for his money’.
In an interview with Bloomberg in 2013, Mr Blair said that the 2010 election ‘would have been tighter than it was’ had he still been Prime Minister, but did not go so far as to suggest he would have won.
In other emails Mr Blumenthal gives an insight into the relationship between Mr Blair and media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. In one dated November 12, 2009, he said Peter Mandelson ‘prided himself on his close personal relationship with Murdoch’. He says Lord Mandelson ‘pioneered’ such a relationship for Mr Blair but by that stage it had ‘come apart at the seams’.
Released emails also shine a light on Mr Blair’s lobbying on behalf of questionable regimes that he has undertaken since leaving office.
In one dated February 23, 2012, Mr Blair contacted Jake Sullivan, Mrs Clinton’s senior foreign policy adviser, asking for help with charity work he was doing for the Guinean president Alpha Conde through his Africa Governance Initiative.
The following year Conde’s government brutally put down mass civil unrest, leaving nine protesters dead. Mr Blair later did PR work for Conde on how to win public support in the wake of the violence. Nobody for Mr Blair was available for comment.