Britain needs Blairite optimism – but it won’t come from Tony Blair

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.  The superficial similarities are obvious enough, and for ease of comparison, Blair himself is ever more visible these days, returning from lucrative global exile to involve himself in the Brexit debate.  

Good times for centrists then? A young star rises in France and the old master returns in Britain? I’m one of the people who should be celebrating that prospect: I’ve argued