Tony Blair's advice for Labour: be more like the coalition

There’s a remarkable self-certainty about what we’ve seen of Tony Blair’s book so far. Sure, there are the fleeting moments of doubt and insecurity: the drinking that was becoming less a pleasure and more a habit, for instance. But, apart from that, the dominant motif is how His Way was the Right Way. And so, he was right to keep Brown on as Chancellor. He was, it seems, right to prosecute war in Iraq – even if the WMD intelligence was “mistaken”. And his chapter on Northern Ireland is written up as a ten-point action plan for future peace processes after future conflicts.

Make no mistake, this isn’t a bad thing in itself. We shouldn’t expect anything different from a politician driven, to an extraordinary degree, by conviction, and writing his own account of a decade in power. But, even considering that, there’s one area where his forthrightness is quite surprising; the deficit.