The Blairites have come back to haunt Keir Starmer's Labour Party – but will it make any difference?

It was Sir Tony's 5,000-word essay setting out everything that has gone wrong since Sir Keir Starmer came to power, which has particularly stung.

The intervention compelled Sir Keir to write his own 3,000-word reply on Substack.

The former Prime Minister didn’t hold back and excoriated Sir Keir for not coming up with “a coherent plan for the country".

Sir Keir's team had "no properly thought-through analysis of how the world was changing and what was meant for policy", the three-time election-winning Prime Minister said.

His stinging attack pointed to failures such as the Net Zero acceleration and the phasing out of oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.

"Does the economy need right now the goal of clean energy or cheap energy?" Sir Tony asked.

I could not have put it better myself. In fact, Tories I have spoken to would have agreed with most of what Sir Tony had to say – you would have thought he was writing a speech for Kemi Badenoch at PMQs.

Sir Tony's timing was deeply political, with the essay published during a half-term when Westminster was bathed in record temperatures and relatively becalmed.

He even intervened in the party's leadership battle, with a deliciously barbed dig at Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor, over Wes Streeting, in the phoney war over who will replace Sir Keir.

"Wes Streeting is a huge political talent, and Andy Burnham was an outstanding member of my Government," Sir Tony said.

Note the use of tenses. Sir Keir replied with his own essay on Substack, agreeing that there is “much, much more” to do and suggesting he wants to tackle welfare reform, as Sir Tony suggested.

Whether this comes to anything is another question, as neither of the reviews by Mr Milburn nor Sir Stephen Timms have asked to cut the welfare budget.

The interim report from Mr Milburn – a former Health Secretary under Sir Tony – was a devastating attack on failures by both the Tories and Labour to help young people get into work.

Taking a step back, it is extraordinary that the Labour Government seems to have lost its way to this extent.

On this week's Chopper's Political Podcast, Peter Hyman – who advised Sir Tony in Downing St for 10 years and then Sir Keir for years before he entered 10 Downing St – told me that Sir Keir and his team had developed "10-year plan" for Government, which were then brushed to one side when he entered No10.

Mr Hyman told me: "They were about doing some of what Tony was saying, which is bashing down the bureaucracy of government and getting things done.

"And that's what the missions were about." And then – once Labour came to power – the party carried out "a brush to one side and that was a mistake".

Not half. Not even two years later, Sir Keir has no permanent communications director or permanent chief of staff and is still struggling to work out what it is for. Time is fast running out.