Would Labour have won in 2010 if Blair had still been leader?

Peter Hain, asked number 383 in the famous series, gives an interesting answer in an interview with Progress.

Tony could still have probably in the 2010 election got us to be the biggest party. Now that’s quite a big statement to make because he was an unpopular prime minister when he left, mainly because of Iraq, but I feel we lost our roots and our values.

He did not say Labour would have won a majority under Blair, but he says that Labour would have done better. Along with Gordon Brown’s own pollster, I think that nearly any other leader would have done better.

But a Blair fourth election is such an implausible hypothetical history that it is hard to judge. He had to stand down in 2007 because his party couldn’t bear him; had he somehow survived until 2010 the party would have been in disarray.

Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AFP/Getty Images

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