Tony Blair is off his trolley on Brexit

For the two decades after her removal of office, Margaret Thatcher’s shadow hung over the Tory party. As its most successful leader since Winston Churchill, her presence was a constant reminder of past successes. As the years rolled on, her most determined devotees ensured that complexity went out the window, and a fascinating and gifted politician with pragmatism and cunning aplenty was somehow recast in the imagination of her fans as a pure figure when she was much more interesting than the myth. The fan club meant that no-one who followed her would ever be deemed good enough by those Tories worshipping at the shrine. Thatcher was the paragon for her supporters, with her name constantly invoked as the test of whether this or that policy was the true way. This rewriting of history made it extremely difficult for the Tories to move on, until David Cameron tried with mixed results.

All the signs are there that Tony Blair’s most ardent fans in politics and the media are making a similar mistake to that made by the most fervent Thatcher advocates, declining to move on and failing to realise that he is – how can one put this politely? – not a net plus for any cause to which he attaches himself. On Brexit I’ve started to suspect he’s secretly switched sides and is being paid as an agent of the Leave side, so incredible are his interventions.

This weekend he has called for restrictions on migration. Honestly, this is beyond parody. The architect of the immigration boom which sped up Brexit now thinks his policy needs adjustment a decade later. Stroll on, sunshine.

These weird perambulations by Blair do have a slightly pathetic and pointless air. He’s the ghost, condemned to traipse around from first class lounge to hotel suite, to have vain discussions with his EU Commission friends. Now the plan seems to be – as expressed by anti-Brexit Lord Adonis too – that Blair is going to convince Merkel and Macron to move on free movement, rewriting the EU and getting the deal David Cameron failed to get and then putting all to a referendum in which the UK votes to stay in the EU. Blair seems off his trolley on this stuff.

The leading Tory Europhile Ken Clarke MP shot down Blair’s scheme rather brilliantly on Sunday on Sky News. Clarke regrets Brexit, but accepts the UK is leaving and now needs to get the best possible transition and free trade deal afterwards. Parliament voted to leave. The UK is leaving the EU. Blair is wasting his time, was the clear implication from the level-headed Ken.

Why is the Blair show inherently pathetic rather than impressive? Partly it is because he has far fewer fans than Thatcher had and as a consequence his move have little clout, no impact, no punch, no sense of drama or hope of realisation about them, and no point, other than giving his small band of fans another run through the greatest hits of a pre-crisis era that seems now as though it was an age ago.

Why is Blair not a more respected figure? Like Thatcher he won three elections, but whereas Thatcher was one of the architects of victory in the Cold War, Blair is tainted with Iraq. His government did not recalibrate the British economy either. It ran it so recklessly it subsequently went off a cliff via a bloated banking sector allowed to become 450% the size of UK GDP. We’re all still paying the bill for that miscalculation.

This record – plus his refusal to listen to warnings about immigration policy at the time, when his excited aides branded anyone who disagreed a racist – means that his interventions are not, generally, greeted with wild enthusiasm by leave voters. Or indeed by anyone outside his small and diminishing support group.