Tony Blair — the unloved one

Tony Blair, international superstar, has jetted into London to deliver the inaugural Philip Gould Memorial Lecture at Progress, a think tank.

The speech would have enraged the likes of Len McCluskey, in the unlikely event that he listened to it.

Blair trotted out all the pleasing soundbites of the past. The ‘third way’ was, he said, ‘a hard-headed examination of the world as it really is.’ Progressive politics was ‘not a cast of policy but a cast of mind. It’s not a programme but a philosophy. It’s not time limited but perpetual.’ The audience drank of these comfy platitudes and were nourished.

Mr S, meanwhile, wondered what Ed Miliband, who has flown to America in pursuit of a photo-op with Barack Obama, made of it all. Blair’s words seemed to be infused with notes of criticism. He said that the financial crisis does not mean that the whole private sector is ‘contaminated’; the march of time and technology continues.