Blair’s revelatory sermon to Starmer

What can the former Prime Minister teach about leadership?

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Tony Blair at rest.

The 1990s are enjoying a revival—from the return of baggy jeans and bucket hats to the reunion of Oasis, and, perhaps most significantly, a Labour government in power once again. Unlike the fervent optimism of 1997, when Tony Blair swept to victory with D: ream’s hit song Things Can Only Get Better as an anthem, today’s Labour government faces criticism for a perceived lack of vision. Luckily, Tony Blair has just released his new book: On Leadership—perhaps a timely read for the current Prime Minister.

Blair's leadership credentials are, at one level at least, pretty impressive: he won three consecutive elections and was the first Labour Prime Minister to do so. His achievements include playing a crucial role in the Northern Ireland Peace Process, reducing NHS wait times, and making a substantial investment in public services. Blair also took a courageous stance with U.S. President Bill Clinton by intervening in the Kosovo conflict against the advice of the UN. He remains however indelibly associated with the controversial 2003 invasion of Iraq that resulted in the deaths of 179 British personnel, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

In this climate of scepticism toward political leaders, Blair's reflections on leadership invite critical questions: Who is this book for? Where is the vision? And even, intriguingly, do we now 'do God'?

Who's it for?

Blair’s book is not a typical guide to general leadership principles; rather, it’s an insider’s view on leading a country. For the average reader, it’s like overhearing a high-level seminar on statecraft—a glimpse into the “room where it happens.”

Maybe there’s a bit of an audience reality check going on in the same way that a TV documentary on what-it’s-really-like-to-be-the-England-football-manager might deliver. Many football fans are happy to shout at our televisions when most have not got even the remotest clue of the challenges and pressures national coaches are under. So perhaps if Blair can tell us how hard it is to handle the myriads of competing challenges as the leader of a nation, readers might better understand the weight of leadership and approach politics – and politicians -with greater humility.

One of the most helpful reflections the book offers was Blair’s self-analysis on three stages of leadership. The first is the new leader listening eagerly; the second comes when they think they know everything, and finally, there’s a third stage of maturity when “once again, with more humility, they listen and learn”. He argues that his book’s purpose is to shorten the learning curve and get leaders to the third stage more quickly.
This a noble cause, but there are times when this book feels like a sermon preached by a slightly unscrupulous vicar, in a church where everyone knows there’s only one person the preacher has in mind. This can make everyone else feel they are there just to fill up the pews so that the message gets delivered. For Blair, his message and his book seem to be very much for Sir Keir Starmer; a plea to him to listen and learn from others.

Where’s the vision?

Blair encourages leaders to make a meaningful impact with their time in office. Recalling a conversation with Shimon Peres, he writes, “Do you want to be in the history books or the visitors’ book?” For Blair, leadership is about pushing boundaries, meeting resistance with persistence, and making difficult choices when others hesitate. He writes, “If you, as a leader, are not a changemaker in this world, it is you who will be changed.” His words on taking risks and demonstrating resilience are certainly inspiring. However, he often focuses on how to lead effectively, with limited exploration of what motivates us to seek positions of leadership in the first place — a disappointing missing focus on moral purpose.

This emphasis on strategy over ideology is evident in chapter titles: The Supreme Importance of Strategy versus The Plague of Ideology. Blair is critical of rigid ideologies, advocating instead for flexibility and pragmatism. He contrasts ideological rigidity with a more agile and pragmatic approach, which could sound like its own simply going-with-the-flow ideology, - a situational ethical approach. This feels very different to the Tony Blair that took on the United Nations over the Serbian genocide in Kosovo. He appeared to take a moral stance driven by a commitment to human rights rather than going with a more pragmatic laissez-faire solution. Blair’s emphasis on pragmatism, while useful, may leave readers wanting more on the values that shape a visionary leader.

Blair includes a joke, a very good one, that feels accidentally pertinent: some people die and the Devil appears and asks them, before they settle for Heaven, to take a look at Hell, because it’s not as bad as they’ve heard. When they see the “drinking and debauchery” in Hell, they ask to be damned. But then they wake up in the real Hell – “cold, miserable and horrible” – and demand to know why it looks nothing like what the Devil showed them. “Ah well,” says the Devil, “back then I was campaigning.”

He meant it as a joke, but the lack of moral clarity in the book made me feel he was sharing more than he intended about the state of political leadership right now. Perhaps sharing to many more than just those he wrote this sermon for. It certainly encapsulates the growing chasm between political promises and reality, as well as illustrating the reason why many people feel disdain, distrust and disappointment in all politicians who say whatever they need to say to get elected.

Are we doing God now?

Famously, when asked about his faith while Prime Minister, Blair was interrupted by his press secretary, Alastair Campbell, who declared, “We don’t do God.” Yet in this book, Blair invokes Moses as an example of leadership under difficult circumstances: “Never underestimate the degree to which people crave leadership. Back to Moses again. The Israelites simultaneously hated and craved his leadership. If you remember, they reached the promised land (though, yes, I know, he didn't).”

Blair sees in Moses a leader who maintained strength and conviction, even in the face of public criticism—a relatable comparison for politicians navigating the pressures of modern social media. Whether or not Blair is “doing God” in this book, he draws inspiration from Moses as a model of resilience and substance, inviting readers to consider leadership as a balance between staying grounded in one’s values and withstanding external pressure.

In the end, On Leadership is a reflective, sometimes provocative take on leading a nation, full of insights that swing from the practical to the idealistic. But it also raises important questions about the ultimate purpose of leadership and the need for a clear moral compass. For a public that remains sceptical of political motives, Blair’s leadership lessons may provide timely, if imperfect, revelation.

Article

Culture

Generosity

Psychology

Virtues

28 April 2025

5 min read

AI will never codify the unruly instructions that make us human

The many exceptions to the rules are what make us human.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A desperate man wearing 18th century clothes holds candlesticks

Jean Valjean and the candlesticks, in Les Misérables.

On average, students with surnames beginning in the letters A-E get higher grades than those who come later in the alphabet. Good looking people get more favourable divorce settlements through the courts, and higher payouts for damages. Tall people are more likely to get promoted than their shorter colleagues, and judges give out harsher sentences just before lunch. It is clear that human judgement is problematically biased – sometimes with significant consequences.

But imagine you were on the receiving end of such treatment, and wanted to appeal your overly harsh sentence, your unfair court settlement or your punitive essay grade: is Artificial Intelligence the answer? Is AI intelligent enough to review the evidence, consider the rules, ignore human vagaries, and issue an impartial, more sophisticated outcome?

In many cases, the short answer is yes. Conveniently, AI can review 50 CVs, conduct 50 “chatbot” style interviews, and identify which candidates best fit the criteria for promotion. But is the short and convenient answer always what we want? In their recent publication, As If Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, Nigel Shadbolt and Roger Hampson discuss research which shows that, if wrongly condemned to be shot by a military court but given one last appeal, most people would prefer to appeal in person to a human judge than have the facts of their case reviewed by an AI computer. Likewise, terminally ill patients indicate a preference for doctor’s opinions over computer calculations on when to withdraw life sustaining treatment, even though a computer has a higher predictive power to judge when someone’s life might be coming to an end. This preference may seem counterintuitive, but apparently the cold impartiality—and at times, the impenetrability—of machine logic might work for promotions, but fails to satisfy the desire for human dignity when it comes to matters of life and death.

In addition, Shadbolt and Hampson make the point that AI is actually much less intelligent than many of us tend to think. An AI machine can be instructed to apply certain rules to decision making and can apply those rules even in quite complex situations, but the determination of those rules can only happen in one of two ways: either the rules must be invented or predetermined by whoever programmes the machine, or the rules must be observable to a “Large Language Model” AI when it scrapes the internet to observe common and typical aspects of human behaviour.

The former option, deciding the rules in advance, is by no means straightforward. Humans abide by a complex web of intersecting ethical codes, often slipping seamlessly between utilitarianism (what achieves the most amount of good for the most amount of people?) virtue ethics (what makes me a good person?) and theological or deontological ideas (what does God or wider society expect me to do?) This complexity, as Shadbolt and Hampson observe, means that:

“Contemporary intellectual discourse has not even the beginnings of an agreed universal basis for notions of good and evil, or right and wrong.”

The solution might be option two – to ask AI to do a data scrape of human behaviour and use its superior processing power to determine if there actually is some sort of universal basis to our ethical codes, perhaps one that humanity hasn’t noticed yet. For example, you might instruct a large language model AI to find 1,000,000 instances of a particular pro-social act, such as generous giving, and from that to determine a universal set of rules for what counts as generosity. This is an experiment that has not yet been done, probably because it is unlikely to yield satisfactory results. After all, what is real generosity? Isn’t the truly generous person one who makes a generous gesture even when it is not socially appropriate to do so? The rule of real generosity is that it breaks the rules.

Generosity is not the only human virtue which defies being codified – mercy falls at exactly the same hurdle. AI can never learn to be merciful, because showing mercy involves breaking a rule without having a different rule or sufficient cause to tell it to do so. Stealing is wrong, this is a rule we almost all learn from childhood. But in the famous opening to Les Misérables, Jean Valjean, a destitute convict, steals some silverware from Bishop Myriel who has provided him with hospitality. Valjean is soon caught by the police and faces a lifetime of imprisonment and forced labour for his crime. Yet the Bishop shows him mercy, falsely informing the police that the silverware was a gift and even adding two further candlesticks to the swag. Stealing is, objectively, still wrong, but the rule is temporarily suspended, or superseded, by the bishop’s wholly unruly act of mercy.

Teaching his followers one day, Jesus stunned the crowd with a catalogue of unruly instructions. He said, “Give to everyone who asks of you,” and “Love your enemies” and “Do good to those who hate you.” The Gospel writers record that the crowd were amazed, astonished, even panicked! These were rules that challenged many assumptions about the “right” way to live – many of the social and religious “rules” of the day. And Jesus modelled this unruly way of life too – actively healing people on the designated day of rest, dining with social outcasts and having contact with those who had “unclean” illnesses such as leprosy. Overall, the message of Jesus was loud and clear, people matter more than rules.

AI will never understand this, because to an AI people don’t actually exist, only rules exist. Rules can be programmed in manually or extracted from a data scrape, and one rule can be superseded by another rule, but beyond that a rule can never just be illogically or irrationally broken by a machine. Put more simply, AI can show us in a simplistic way what fairness ought to look like and can protect a judge from being punitive just because they are a bit hungry. There are many positive applications to the use of AI in overcoming humanity’s unconscious and illogical biases. But at the end of the day, only a human can look Jean Valjean in the eye and say, “Here, take these candlesticks too.”

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