Blair’s face was pained... like he had a pair of tights over his head
Look out, ego alert! As the last dregs of Labour’s credibility disappear down the plug hole, enter the party’s former messiah – one Tony Blair. It’s less than a month since the old panto dame last bemoaned the state of British politics and, never one to let a good crisis go to waste, up he clambered on to his pulpit again yesterday to tell his former flock where they’d gone wrong.
Talk about squeezing lemon into an open wound!
The former prime minister was addressing an audience in central London. He looked in good nick. Slimly tailored suit, silken Hermes tie. A trim, relatively sportif figure suggested the recent ministrations of a personal trainer.
Mr Blair’s main message of the morning was that his old party had become a ‘comedy cult’ that was ‘marooned on fantasy island’.
If it kept on going down the 1970s-inspired route of high taxes and re-nationalisation it had pursued since 2015, it was doomed.
To give him credit, it was a speech that managed to be both biting and funny. I laughed out loud a couple of times. An authority on such matters advises me that the colourful phraseology bore all the hallmarks of Mr Blair’s own pen.
The general election result, Mr Blair announced, had ‘brought shame on us’. By ‘us’ he meant Labour voters, although with all the millions he has squirrelled away from his business dealings, consultancies and the after- dinner circuit, I struggle to believe he could ever have brought himself to vote for the current tax-and-grab rabble.
Jeremy Corbyn, predictably, came in for a pasting. Mr Blair has never been one for flagrant insults – instead his attacks on the Labour leader were precise, measured, like carefully aimed body shots.
And as any pugilist will tell you, it’s those blows which often cause the most damage. Mr Corbyn, he said, personified a ‘brand of quasi-revolutionary socialism’.
Ha! As he said this I couldn’t help but think of Jezza dressed in military fatigues like Fidel Castro, brandishing a rusty kalashnikov, a frayed cheroot clasped between his gnashers.
As for the manifesto, which promised voters giveaways galore, the whole pamphlet was a joke.
‘Any fool can promise anything for free,’ said Mr Blair. Quite so.
He heralded Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s promise of free, state-provided broadband as ‘the final moment of incredulity’.
Mr Blair’s polite tone had by now morphed into one of mild disgust. His perma-tanned face was stretched in a permanently pained expression, as though he had a pair of women’s tights pulled over his head.
Frequently, his arms were flung aloft in exasperation.
HIS disregard for Mr Corbyn’s so- called strategists was as palpable as for their boss.
He compared them to a useless football side ‘ where the striker was directionally oblivious, the midfield obsolete, the defence absent in the stand chatting to a small portion of the fans and the goalkeeper behind the net retweeting a clip of the one save he made in a 9-0 defeat’.
Naturally, Mr Blair’s own achievements were afforded plenty of airing.
‘The largest ever investment in schools and hospitals... cuts in child poverty... reduction in homeless numbers...’ He worked himself into such a froth over his own perceived triumphs, it was a mercy he didn’t suddenly yank down a screen and start showing us pie charts.
What particularly irked him was how ungrateful those Corbynistas were, having spent the past four years disowning him. New Labour, he announced huffily, was not ‘a project of the metropolitan liberal elite’ as the Corbynistas claimed. It was extremely popular in Labour’s heartlands.
Dennis Skinner’s old seat in Bolsover, he pointed out, which Labour lost last week for the first time in decades, had a majority of 18,000 on his watch.
It was all very me, me, me – ‘I was right, do as I say’ etc. Usual Blair in other words. But it was hard to disagree with a word he said.
Towards the end, there was an eloquent passage in which he acknowledged that the siren’s call of the far-Left may seem like a tempting cry against the system, ‘but it isn’t a programme for government’.
Sage words, though much good they’ll do, I fear. The Labour Party is in for a long, cold winter.