Tony Blair is a post-democratic product

Why was it that when I read a big interview with Tony Blair over the weekend – the ostensible premise being to wonder if he’d be pulling the strings of a Starmer government – I found myself humming something from T.S. Eliot by way of Andrew Lloyd Webber? ‘You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air – / But I tell you once and once again, / It’s Tony bloody Blair.’

Eliot’s Macavity the Mystery Cat, of course, is a dyed-in-the-wool criminal who breaks laws up to and including the law of gravity, whereas our former prime minister is as upright and law-abiding figure as you will find in possession of business cards reading ‘Tony Blair’. But they share the ability to be everywhere and nowhere. He’s in and out of the White House. He sidles through the palaces of this and that despotism. An admiring standfirst has it that ‘the Tony Blair Institute’s 800 staff are now helping to run almost 40 countries’.