Kemi Badenoch insisted the Tories are now Tony Blair's only hope of getting a growth-focused Government to save Britain.

The Conservative leader warned that Labour will ignore the ex-PM's appeal to ease the tax burden, scale back Net Zero and trim welfare.

She said her party was the 'only show in town' for that agenda, with Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting all courting the Left-wing.   

Labour has been engaging in another intense bout of soul-searching about its future, triggered by Sir Tony's 5,000 word essay earlier this week.

Responding to his intervention in the Times this afternoon, Ms Badenoch said Labour MPs have no idea 'where money comes from' and believe one person's success 'must always have come at somebody else's expense'.

'The Blairite legacy is that the entire country is now run by HR as Labour junk your best ideas and champion your worst,' she said. 

'There is only one show in town for the political project you proposed. In the short term, the Conservative project is relentlessly focused on delivering a high-growth, lower-immigration economy, cheaper energy by scrapping Miliband's Net Zero targets, reducing Starmer's ballooning welfare bill and putting the money directly into defence to increase our military strength.' 

Mr Burnham has accused three-time general election winner Sir Tony - whose Government he served in - of failing to reject Margaret Thatcher's legacy.

He attributed economic success in Manchester - where he is currently mayor - to a 'very interventionist' approach as he said the markets shouldn't dictate policy.

Mrs Badenoch said: 'Andy Burnham's reply proves your point better than I ever could. Faced with your warning that Labour needs growth, cheaper energy and welfare restraint, his answer is more state control, more public spending and another attack on markets and enterprise.

'Burnham will learn the hard way that spending taxpayers' money as mayor is much easier than finding it as prime minister.'

Ms Badenoch said Labour politicians were 'embarrassed' by Sir Tony's election wins and wanted to 'test to destruction all the left-wing ideas that were mothballed in 1979'.

In his own essay answering Sir Tony, Mr Burnham wrote: 'The lesson from Greater Manchester is that you can't just leave it to the market, as Tony's essay seems to suggest.

'If you want higher growth in areas that don't have it, you need strong public control and direction over both the investment strategy and the enablers of a more productive economy, such as transport, energy, water, education and housing.'

Swiping at Sir Tony, he said: 'The Labour government in which I was proud to serve did many great things. It did not, however, take us off the direction set by Thatcher.

'This has given us 40 years of neoliberalism and the simple truth is this: it has not been kind to communities in Makerfield and those like them across the UK. Trickle-down economics did not in the end trickle down very much at all.'

Mr Burnham argued that deregulation was behind the 2008 Credit Crunch, and that had caused Britain's ongoing political turmoil.

'The fall in the living standards of millions, and the reality that life has got harder for most year-on-year since the financial crash in 2008, is, I believe, the gaping omission in (Sir Tony's) analysis,' he said.

'This has been the single biggest driver of the turmoil in politics he describes and the cratering of support for traditional parties of Right and Left, here and around the world.'

In his own response to Sir Tony, Sir Keir said during a visit to a London train depot yesterday: 'My response to Tony is, yes, it's right to talk about policy, it's right to talk about ideas, that's where the debate should be.

'But actually no, I don't agree that the policy choices of this Government weren't the right policy choices given what we inherited, a very different situation in 2024 to 1997.'