If Corbyn loses and stays there will be a new party, says Blair mentor
The time might be right for a "third way" with a new party if Jeremy Corbyn won't go, says Tony Blair's long-time election agent.
Tuesday 16 May 2017 16:31, UK
Tony Blair's mentor says that if Jeremy Corbyn loses the General Election and refuses to step down, the Labour right and centre will form their own party.
And, says the former Prime Minister's long-time election agent, John Burton, he would join it.
It was Mr Burton who chose the fresh-faced young Mr Blair as the candidate for Sedgefield, the collection of pit mining villages in County Durham, the last Labour safe seat to choose a candidate for the 1983 election.
Blair went on to credit Burton with providing him with the anchor in working class opinion and thought that he, the Fettes educated Hackney lawyer, struggled to access.
They became so close that as Burton told me in a spin around Sedgefield in my lorry, the young MP shared a home with Burton and his wife Lily.
"Lily became a sort of surrogate mother figure to him, as he'd lost his mother very young."
So close did they become, that when Lily died of cancer five years ago, Burton told me, Blair rushed back to County Durham from a summit in Jerusalem.
He said: "This has not been broadcast...but I told him on the Monday she wouldn't be here in a few days time. So he chartered a flight back from Jerusalem to Newcastle, taxi from there, and she was in his arms by 9am on the Tuesday. Says something about the man doesn't it?"
Burton believes the current situation with the party is much worse than in the 1980s, the last time the right of the party faced down the far left.
"New Labour was something which could have been built on. But it could now go backwards - it could go backwards to oblivion if doesn't go after the election."
If that happens, he says there would have to be a new party, which he would support: "I would have to because this isn't the party I've known, the party I've believed in."
On the question of whether Blair - with whom he is still in frequent contact - agrees with his analysis, Burton chuckles, refusing to be drawn: "Oh I don't know, we haven't discussed it.
"But he was always talking about the Third Way wasn't he? Neither left nor right. It would fit with his philosophy."
Whatever their detractors, it's always worth remembering that before Tony Blair and New Labour no Labour government had run to two full consecutive terms.
Few would have thought, least of all Burton, that only twenty years later, many are openly speculating whether it can ever win again.
If the polls are right and the party is reduced to a rump after this election, then whoever takes the reins might well look to this quiet corner of England for at least some of the answers for how a party on the brink might restore itself.
Burton might not be done yet.