Tony blair

Though I don’t think much of Theresa May’s paternalistic soft-left politics, I do like her no-nonsense style. That Q&A she did for the Sunday Times where she was asked ‘Sherlock or Midsomer Murders?’ — ‘I’ve watched both’ she replied — was hilarious in its Olympian imperviousness to the convention, established by Tony Blair, that prime ministers must kowtow at all times to popular culture and sentiment. So too was the extraordinarily unevasive answer she gave when asked recently why she was committed to allowing Conservative MPs a free vote on rescinding Tony Blair’s fox-hunting ban. ‘As it happens, personally, I’ve always been in favour of fox hunting,’ she said. Me too.

What is Tony Blair playing at? Our permatanned former Prime Minister recently declared himself to be closer to the Liberal Democrats than his own party due to his position on Brexit. "Unique circumstances demand a unique response," he said, so Labour voters in certain seats "should cross party lines" and vote for Liberal Democrats - in the cause of Remain. Might the love be reciprocated? Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat leader, was on the Andrew Marr show today and he was asked about whether he had met Blair told discuss such an alliance. He fessed up. “Several months ago I met with Tony Blair at his request. I thought it was only courteous to do so. I have many on the record disagreements with Tony Blair not least over the illegal and counterproductive war in Iraq.

We all have different ways of realising we're not as young as we were. I still remember the first time England named a cricket captain younger than me: Andrew Strauss (a man I still believe will one day serve as a Conservative parliamentarian incidentally).   Passing that milestone didn't bother me much, but the relative youth of politicians is a bit harder to take. Put it this way: I'm 41 and the best I've managed to achieve professionally is to end up running a centrist think-tank. Emmanuel Macron, on course to run France as a centrist president, is 39.  Macron gets called a lot of things, but many in Britain find it easiest to understand him as a Blairite.

Why is it so striking that Tony Blair has said that Theresa May will be Prime Minister ‘if the polls are right’? On the surface, this appears to be a statement of the bleeding obvious, given the Tory party national poll lead isn’t exactly within the margin of error. Of course, around election time, politicians do develop the amazing ability to argue that the earth can in fact be flat, and in a normal election Blair might be focusing on talking about how Jeremy Corbyn can in fact become Prime Minister. His refusal to do that may have mildly surprised people.

Here they come, Tony Blair and his tragic chattering-class army. The former PM, whose rictus grin and glottal stops still haunt the nation’s dreams (well, mine anyway), is on the march with his pleb-allergic mates in business and the media. Blair and the Twitterati, linking arms, united in their horror at the incalculable stupidity of northerners and Welsh people and Essex men and women and other Brexiteers, their aim as clear as it is foul. They’re here to save us from ourselves. ‘Tony Blair is trying to save Britain from itself’, as one report put it. Excuse me while I pop an anti-nausea pill. Yes, Blair, the political version of Michael Myers, the nutter in the Halloween movies who just cannot be slain, is back. Again.

Martin McGuinness’s death has sparked a wave of fawning and fury in the obituaries. So: ‘man of war’, peacemaker or something in between? The Sun’s verdict is clear: the ‘pious praise’ for McGuinness is nothing short of ‘revolting’. It’s true, the paper says, that the ‘second part’ of his life differed from his early days. And it’s also the case that McGuinness ‘risked his own neck’ to help bring peace in the end. But to hear the likes of Tony Blair play down McGuinness's role as an IRA commander ‘turns the stomach’. McGuinness might have fancied himself as a ‘folk hero’, but there was ‘nothing noble about this “struggle’, says the Sun.

Why did 17.4m people vote for Brexit? A long list of reasons have been put forward but Tony Blair thinks he has the definitive answer: ‘authoritarian populism’. The Sun is not impressed; the paper says that it’s a sorry spectacle to see former Prime Ministers ‘slinging insults’ at voters having been ‘defeated and rejected by the people they used to govern’. What’s more, Blair’s attempt to explain away the referendum shows he is missing the point. After all, the paper argues, Blair seems rather less keen to ‘acknowledge the effects of the uncontrolled immigration he forced on British communities’ in determining the outcome of the referendum. But Blair isn’t alone.

Tim Farron's fearsome foursome: May, Le Pen, Trump, Putin What can Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, do to get attention? He had an idea  for the party's conference in York today: suggest that the world is in the grip of a fearsome foursome: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen... and Theresa May. He claimed that have the same traits in common: being "aggressive, nationalistic, anti-Nato, anti-EU. It is the post-war internationalist consensus unravelling in real time. Winston Churchill's vision for a world that achieves peace through trade, common values and shared endeavour evaporating before our eyes." Clegg: Bring on the election.

If you want to judge the extent of the crisis that is paralysing the left, look at this morning’s Guardian. On the one hand you have an article from Abi Wilkinson, who tellingly doesn’t even mention the Labour leader’s name. Convincingly to my mind, Wilkinson argues that the May government ought to be in all kinds of trouble. May herself is an evasive and awkward politician. She is presiding over an NHS that has had more austerity than it can stand. The British Red Cross may have been guilty of hyperbole when it said the UK faced a 'humanitarian crisis' across the whole of its health service. But individual patients are finding that, as far as they and their families are concerned, a humanitarian crisis is exactly what they must endure.

Sir John Major does political intervention just right, doesn’t he? Never mind what he actually says. Once a year, twice max. Lob in a perfectly prepared hand grenade, wave and get the hell out. None of that terrible neediness of Tony Blair, still so stricken that he’s not in office. No children will cry, nor dogs howl, as they might at the biannual haphazard sight of Gordon Brown. Major is never hysterical, and never cheap, and he always disappears again within 24 hours. Precisely how an ex-prime minister ought to be. David Cameron, wherever he is, should be taking notes.

The ghosts of Prime Ministers past aren’t making life easy for Theresa May. John Major has now followed in the haunted footsteps of Tony Blair by criticising his successor’s approach to Brexit. Major used a speech yesterday to say people are being offered an ‘unreal’ vision of Brexit by the Government. Unsurprisingly, Major’s intervention has won him few friends in the newspaper editorials this morning. The Sun says it’s good news that Theresa May - and not John Major is in charge. After all, if the former PM was involved in Brexit talks, his ‘defeatist gloom’ would inevitably mean  that things 'would end as badly as he ­predicts’.

After Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell returned to urge a revolt against Brexit, only one thing was missing: Peter Mandelson, who turned up on Andrew Marr's sofa yesterday. Ever on-message, he repeated Blair's line that the 52 per cent of the country who backed Brexit 'had no idea of the terms on which the government would decide to leave the EU’. So is the ‘prince of darkness’ simply up to his old tricks? Mandelson's intervention certainly hasn't earned him a warm reception in the newspaper editorials this morning. The Sun describes Mandelson as ‘disgraced’ and says the peer’s ‘contempt for democracy’ was the exact reason that ‘led to the demand for Brexit’ in the first place.

In normal times, by-elections are bad for governing parties and good for oppositions. But it is an indicator of how much trouble Labour is in, as I say in The Sun this morning, that they are the ones who are nervous ahead of Thursday’s by-elections. Some in the Labour machine seem almost resigned to losing Copeland to the Tories and are concentrating on trying to hold off Ukip in Stoke. Given that Labour is polling as low as 24% and Jeremy Corbyn’s ratings are worse than Michael Foot’s were at this point in his leadership, and the epic defeat Foot led Labour to in 1983 paved the way for 14 more years of Tory government, you might think that defeat in either contest would be the end of Corbyn’s leadership. But it won’t be.

I don't know about you but if I were to make a speech arguing that democracy should be abandoned, I probably wouldn't begin by saying 'I want to be explicit. Yes, the British people voted to leave Europe. And I agree the will of the people should prevail.' That's just me, however. When Tony Blair says this, he apparently means to encourage an anti-democratic insurrection. Which, I suppose, makes sense if you still suffer from an acute case of Blair Derangement Syndrome. Plenty of people evidently do. If Blair is really as toxic and irrelevant as his critics aver, there'd be no need for all this fury. Blood vessels could remain unburst and eyes unpopped. The reaction to Blair's speech suggests something else. It suggests that he must have a point.