Tony Blair: Labour would have won in 2010 if they'd been more New Labour

Tony Blair has continued to beat the drum for New Labour, just days before left-winger Jeremy Corbyn is expected to be announced as the Labour party's new leader.

The former prime minister, who was being interviewed by Charles Clarke and Toby James for a book called British Labour Leaders - an extract which was published in The Independent on Monday - said his party could have won the 2010 election if it hadn't given up on New Labour principles and admonished his colleagues for choosing a different direction.

When asked what the biggest challenges he faced in developing a winning electoral strategy were, here's what he had to say:

Bits of the party wanted to pull me off it. The tragedy of the Labour Party is that in 2010 we could have won if we had, after 2007, taken New Labour to a new level.

We drew the opposite conclusion - which was that the public had had too much of it - and it therefore needed to be dampened down.

But there was no evidence from the public that that was what they thought. It was really that the party had become a little exhausted by it all, and therefore wanted something calmer and easier.

The most difficult thing today for political leaders, certainly if you are a progressive political leader, is you have got to get to the centre ground to win - and your party wants to pull you back from that.

British Labour Leaders, by Charles Clarke and Toby S James (Biteback), is published on Tuesday. You can read a fuller extract of the book on the Independent website here.

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