Blair wants to ‘get his hands dirty’ fighting Brexit. But they’re already soiled by sins he can NEVER wash away, writes DOMINIC SANDBROOK

Twenty years after Tony Blair walked into No 10 as Prime Minister, the longest-serving Labour PM in history has announced his return to front-line politics.

Horrified by Theresa May’s plans for Brexit, Mr Blair is apparently looking forward to ‘reconnecting with voters’ in the coming General Election campaign.

‘You need to get your hands dirty,’ he told the Daily Mirror, ‘and I will.’

A clinical psychologist could spend an entire career peering into the murky recesses of Mr Blair’s subconscious. Even by his own standards, though, his recent statement was remarkably revealing.

For one thing, it was a reminder of his world-class sense of entitlement, not least his apparently God-given right to lecture the rest of us about politics until the end of his days.

Never mind that when he stepped down as prime minister in 2007, he turned his back on Britain and spent the next decade prostituting himself across the planet.

What arrogance, then, to presume he can simply drop back into British politics whenever he feels like it.

But what was even more revealing, I think, was that image of getting his hands dirty.

It was Mr Blair who once pledged that his government would be ‘purer than pure’ — a typically hubristic promise, given that all prime ministers have to make difficult, often dirty, choices.

No prime minister in recent history, though, has left office with his hands so obviously besmirched. Certainly none has smeared more ordure on his own reputation afterwards.

Perhaps he believes that intervening in the General Election campaign will wash away his sins. But there are some that no amount of scrubbing can remove.

Once the most talented politician of his generation, Mr Blair now cuts a tragically self-deluding figure.

And whatever he might tell himself, I suspect the stains of the past two decades will never be wiped clean.

THANKS, BERNIE

Mr Blair had been in office for only six months before the first stains appeared.

In Opposition, he promised to ban all tobacco advertising in sport. But then came a mysterious U-turn, with an unexpected exemption for Formula One motor racing.

It soon transpired that the Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone had given Labour a cheque for £1 million before the 1997 general election.

In return, Mr Blair pushed through an exemption for Formula One, despite the objections of Department of Health officials.

When the news broke, he maintained that he was a ‘pretty straight sort of guy’. But the Ecclestone affair was the first sign that, in reality, he was the exact opposite.

IRAQ DECEPTION

Try as he might, Tony Blair will never emerge from beneath the shadow of Iraq.

And though it is one of the most well-worn debates in our recent history, the plain fact is that no modern prime minister has ever committed Britain to war on a flimsier pretext or against greater public opposition.

One fact alone speaks volumes about his shameless mendacity.

Even in the spring of 2003, as the invasion approached, he pretended to the British public that there was still a chance to avoid war. Yet as the Chilcot report showed last summer, he had actually written to U.S. president George W. Bush in July 2002, promising: ‘I will be with you, whatever.’

GADDAFI’S PAL

For decades, Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi loved to present himself as the sworn foe of Britain, where his thugs had gunned down WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside Libya’s London embassy in 1984.

Yet Mr Blair had no compunction about striking the notorious ‘deal in the desert’ with Gaddafi in 2004, reopening diplomatic relations and paving the way for a series of lucrative BP oil deals.

To our even greater shame, it was later alleged that, around the time of the deal, Britain helped fly Libyan dissidents to Tripoli, where they were tortured by Gaddafi’s secret police — although the Labour Government denied this.

Mr Blair courted Gaddafi not just as an ally, but as a personal friend. After leaving office in 2007, he was twice flown to Tripoli on Libyan jets at Gaddafi’s expense for business meetings.

Even as Gaddafi’s regime crumbled, Mr Blair rang his friend and urged him to flee to safety — advice the Libyan dictator fatally ignored.

HONOURS FARCE

When Mr Blair became prime minister, he promised to clean up party funding.

But in the spring of 2006 it emerged that he had recommended several men for life peerages after they had given huge loans to the cash-stricken Labour Party.

Indeed, it later transpired that not only had he given honours to three out of four people who gave at least £50,000 to his party, but had rewarded every donor who gave more than £1 million with a peerage or a knighthood.

Not since David Lloyd George openly sold peerages in the Twenties had the honours system been so flagrantly debased. Yet as so often during the Blair years, no one went to jail.

FAT CATS’ FRIEND

When Tony Blair left office in 2007, the economy seemed to be buoyant — yet within months it was clear that this was a miracle built on sand, as the banks collapsed and Britain lurched into a devastating recession.

Only afterwards did it become clear just how deeply he was implicated in the collapse, having transferred City regulation away from the Bank of England to the flimsy Financial Services Authority. And even as others condemned the growing culture of reckless speculation and fat-cat bonuses, he resisted all attempts to tame the banks.

He got his reward, though. Within six months of leaving office, he landed a £2 million-a-year job as a consultant to Wall Street investment bank J. P. Morgan, which has been fined a record £33 million for failing to protect British clients’ money — a good metaphor, you might say, for the way Mr Blair has treated the public.

DEAL WITH IRA

Mr Blair’s courtiers often trumpet his involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process as his greatest accomplishment in office, conveniently forgetting the foundations were actually laid by his predecessor, John Major.

What they rarely mention is his enthusiasm for handing out secret letters that effectively protected former IRA men — some suspected of murderous atrocities — from prosecution.

He handed out these letters to 187 so-called ‘on-the-runs’ — former IRA men wanted for robberies, assassinations and atrocities during the Troubles, including the horrific bomb attack that killed four soldiers in Hyde Park in 1982.

Yet in another reminder of his fundamental duplicity, he never mentioned them to Unionist politicians or the Irish government — let alone the British public. In fact, the existence of the letters only came to light years later, in 2014.

PROPERTY MOGUL

In an age when millions of young people can’t get a place on the property ladder, Mr Blair’s relentless collection of houses is surely the most striking symbol of his apparently unbounded greed.

Since he entered politics, he has amassed a property empire of at least ten houses and 27 flats, worth £27 million, many of them registered in the names of his wife or their children.

Yet the cruel irony is that during his 13 years in office, his government built just 7,870 council houses — fewer than the Tories built every year under Margaret Thatcher.

With private rents rocketing, the poor lost out. But the Blairs cashed in.

MONEY MAD

The irony of Mr Blair’s attempted political comeback is that for the past ten years he has shown virtually no interest in British politics at all.

Instead, he has devoted himself to the one thing he really cares about — his bank balance.

His astounding pursuit of personal enrichment in the past ten years has appalled even his closest allies.

Not content with charging a staggering £200,000 per speech, he has secured contracts with a bewildering array of foreign interests, including the governments of Peru, Mongolia, Rwanda, Malawi, Albania and Romania, as well as the world’s largest mining firm, Glencore, and the oil firm PetroSaudi (owned by a member of the Saudi royal family).

Surely, no British politician has ever prostituted himself to quite the same extent. And given his international business links, how can Mr Blair possibly claim that he is an objective commentator on Britain’s future relationship with the rest of the world?

DICTATOR’S VOICE

Kazakhstan’s dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has wielded power since 1991, presides over one of the world’s most corrupt regimes.

Torture is common, political and religious freedoms tightly restricted and five years ago the regime brutally massacred striking oil workers.

A perfect client, then, for Tony Blair, who charged Mr Nazarbayev more than £5 million a year for political advice, not including chauffeured limousines and five-star hotels.

With supreme cynicism, Mr Blair even advised the Kazakh regime on how to deal with the PR fallout of the massacre.

‘These events, tragic though they were, should not obscure the enormous progress Kazakhstan has made,’ he insisted.

GUINEA FOUL

One of Mr Blair’s murkiest associations is with Guinea, an obscure African country that he has visited six times since 2011 after securing a deal to advise its president, Alpha Conde.

By an astonishing coincidence, Mr Blair also works as a well-paid adviser to Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, which secured a massive contract to invest in Guinea’s new bauxite and iron ore mines.

Of course, Mr Blair’s friends insist that this is merely a happy accident — the kind of accident that often seems to happen to well-connected people like our former prime minister, but never to the millions who once put their trust in him.

Daily Mail

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