by Sunny Hundal

It was always obvious that Tony Blair hated the left. His recently published book said nothing new on that front.

What’s staggering is how easily he dismisses even close Labour colleagues and ministers.

Jon Cruddas

Jon made quite a name for himself. It was clever political positioning. To his overall political analysis – New Labour had deserted the working class and thus our base – he added a programme for the party. It was clothed in some modernist language, but was ultimately an attempt to build a left coalition out of Guardian intellectuals and trade union activists. However beguiling – and he was smart enough to make it beguiling – it was, in effect, reheated and updated Bennism from the 1980s.

Douglas Alexander

Douglas was and is a very clever guy indeed. I had tried to wean him off membership of Gordon’s inner circle; but to no avail. It was a real shame … But the Gordon curse was to make these people co-conspirators, not free-range thinkers. He and Ed Balls and others were like I had been back in the 1980s, until slowly the scales fell from my eyes and I realised ir was more like a cult than a kirk.

Ed Balls

He has guts and he can take decisions. But he suffers from the bane of all left-leaning intellectuals. As I have remarked elsewhere, these guys never ‘get’ aspiration … He added a truly muddled and ultimately very damaging party critique. This was the view – I fear tutored by Gordon’s inclination in dealing with the party – that I deliberately chose confrontations with the party in order to demonstrate my independent credentials with the public.

John Prescott

At Cabinet, he would occassionally sit like a grumbling volcano ready to erupt at any moment. The proximate cause of the eruption would more often than not be one of the women intervening. Patricia Hewitt was certain to get him moving … John would make some slightly off-colour remark if he was in a sour mood. I would then bring her back in again, just for the sheer entertainment of watching him finally explode … He genuinely made me laugh. It was a bit like ‘How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?’ In The Sound of Music, though the similarlity ends there…

Perhaps his most alarming trait was his habit of starting a conversation in the middle – no beginning, no context, no explanation of what the problem was. I remember a time when it looking as if I was going to bring the LibDems into the cabinet … In storms John. ‘Where’s fookin’ Menzies?’ he begins. It wasn’t a promising start…

John Smith

Of course, I had no knoweldge that John would die prematurely. Except that, in a strange way, I began to think he might… I said to (Cherie): ‘If John dies, I will be leader, not Gordon. And somehow, I think this will happen. I just think it will.’ Is that a premonition? Not in a strict sense; but it was strange all the same. On Saturday afternoon we went to see Schindler’s List…

* * * * *

WTF was the last one about?

And then there’ his dismissal of…

recalcitrant union leaders, bolshie MPs, lefty activists and assorted intellectuals whose main contribution was to explain why nothing should change in the name of being real radicals

What does it say about Tony Blair’s loyalty to the party and the movement? What does it say about his committment to pluralism within the party?

Even the Spectator Coffeehouse blog admits (which reproduced the quotes) that Tony Blair did “not like the Labour Party one bit”.