Blair excoriated in withering dismissal

For those of you who have not yet read Matthew Norman's shredding of Bloody Blair in the Indie, I urge you to create a quality ten minutes with the tipple of your choice and savour the flaying of any shred of political credibility from Blair's permatanned hide. Turn away now to avoid a brief extract, as they say ...

For most of the past year, he has been attempting to use the issue of Brexit and the resentments it has unleashed as the catalyst for the formation of a new centrist political party, which he could control from offstage. Any doubt about that was removed by the movement of his lips when he denied it to Marr.

The glib vagaries that served him superbly in the mid-nineties boom times – the cultivated vagueness evident from his vacuous witterings about conjuring up some magically EU-friendly immigration constraints – are out of vogue. Theresa May could have told him this, but there is no appetite for bland reassurance and vapid rhetoric when people in full-time work cannot afford to feed their children, let alone to buy or rent a decent home.

If Blair is a kind of tragicomic Napoleon gazing across the sea from Elba, he is no longer a good general. He isn’t even the bad general of cliché. He isn’t fighting the last war. He isn’t fighting the war before that. He is fighting no war at all outside his own narcissistic head. The war he is fighting is the one against his own irrelevance, and that was lost a long time ago.

Exquisite.