“A cynic”, the American critic Ambrose Bierce noted, “is a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”

Tony Blair has been called a lot worse than a blackguard. He may well be a ‘faulty visionary’. He is, however, certainly a cynic; a 100% signed-up viewer of the motives of men as inherently base and self-interested.

As he briefly floated in and out of our parochial little orbit last week, our emeritus PM, now peacemaker-at-large and aspirant bookseller, had no shortage of cynical observations to dispense.

In his new memoir, A Journey, he breezily trashes signature Labour policies like the ban on fox-hunting and the freedom of information act. The former, in his view, unworkable, the latter too unpredictable. In a familiar riff on the obsolescence of ‘left’ and ‘right’ he even concedes that he does not consider himself on the left any more. He goes on to warn that voters do not want the state becoming a “major player” in the economy and that a drift leftwards will consign Labour to two terms in opposition. (more…)