𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Does anyone care what Tony Blair thinks, aside from the man himself and the ideologically flexible bores of the Labour back bench? Five thousand words of the stuff, which, thankfully, dear reader, I read so you don’t have to.

The thrust appeared to be the usual fare that he was right all along, and still is – that and some dull reference to heading back into the “Premier League of nations”. Politics must change, he raved, and Sir Keir Starmer can achieve all he desires and cement his place in the history books simply by following a 10-point plan thoughtfully provided, free of charge, by the man himself. I find it best to read it in that imploring, head-tilted, hand-on-heart voice, the very same voice that once assured us Saddam Hussein could vaporise Cyprus in 45 minutes.

Briefly, you may be tempted to agree with him. That’s ever the trouble with Blair – at first glance, he always seems marvellously plausible.

But before we take the doctor’s note, it’s first worth recalling that the patient was poisoned by said doctor the last time he practised.

Everywhere we turn now, the topic of Blairism is being discussed without the barely concealed contempt with which it ought to be held. So bereft of ideas is the modern Labour Party that they’ve taken to reincarnating a set of ideas that ought long to have been consigned to the history books.

Blairism rested on the conviction that politics was essentially a problem of management. It saw the nation rather in the same way as a consultant views a business plan.

Everything must be modernised, people’s awkward attachments to sovereignty and tradition and place should be dissolved into a frictionless global order of regulation, ethics and law.

Happiness, in this vision, was the ultimate end of human life, and happiness meant GDP, consumer choice, and an office job sending very important emails. Everything solid was to be made liquid. And under Blair it was.

Blair remains one of the most transformative politicians in our recent history – that is, if your version of transformation mostly involves disfiguring a country beyond recognition.

I grew up under Blair. One of my earliest political memories was of my grandmother “seeing what was on the other side” whenever he popped up, smirking away, on BBC One. She never explained why, but an examination of what he did to the country provides a set of reasons easily.

He decided, as if on a whim, that half of all young people should attend university, and so they did. My generation did as ordered, told for years that the end goal of schooling was to get enough points to get into university. If you didn’t, that way lay ruin.

Some years later, hundreds of thousands of us emerged clutching degrees of ever-dwindling worth and many found themselves shackled with an average of £53,000 in debt. Now, somewhere between 37 and 44% of us wish we had never bothered.

Blair would also oversee a great march of construction, hospitals, schools and more – though the conjuring trick of the Private Finance Initiative, keeping the cost off the books while quietly committing the taxpayer to a bill of perhaps £250billion.

During his unfortunately long tenure, he also presided over a 210% rise in house prices, pricing an entire generation out of the property-owning democracy that once held a stable society together.

And if that wasn’t enough, he flung open the borders to mass migration on a scale unseen in our history, never asking the country whether they wanted it or not.

Next, he set about the constitution with the gleeful abandon of a man rearranging someone else’s furniture: the Human Rights Act, which handed Strasbourg a veto over British judgment; the Freedom of Information Act, which he later confessed had made him feel like a “nincompoop”; the half-abolition of the hereditary peers, leaving the Lords a permanent building site; and a ban on new grammar schools, the single most effective ladder of working-class advancement this country ever possessed, kicked away by a man who then sent his own sons to selective education.

This is the genius now offering to mend what he broke. There is something almost magnificent in the nerve of it, the arsonist returning to the smoking ruin to deliver a lecture on fire safety, the only small mercy being (for once) that he offers this service for free.

Regrettably, Blair remains formidable. He is clever, tireless, and globally influential in a manner perhaps no other living Briton can match. But cleverness is not wisdom, and influence is not vindication. We have been swallowing his prescriptions, in one form or another, for thirty years.

It is time, at long last, to stop listening to Tony Blair.