Everyone else is thinking it, so I’m just going to say it: we need Tony Blair back in Downing Street. I don’t know by what mechanism and I don’t especially care. A by-election would be ideal, I suppose. They’re all the rage these days. Sedgefield is now known as Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor (ugh) and Alan Strickland should do the decent thing and step down in the national interest. If for some reason this didn’t work out, there’s always the Lords. I’ve never been keen on this modern convention that prime ministers cannot lead from the upper house. The last PM who did so was, of course, the Marquess of Salisbury. He left office for the third and final time in 1902, and it’s been all downhill ever since.

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Blair’s essay is the talk of Westminster not because it’s being pushed by a shadowy network of Centrist Dad columnists, as his obsessive and orcish right-wing haters imagine, but because he is the first prime minister since, well, himself to grasp the scale of Britain’s maladies and, most important of all, be prepared to take radical action to remedy them. In contrast to all those useless Tory prime ministers who presided over unprecedented waves of illegal immigration, Blair says: ‘We should deal by whatever means with small boats.’ He even uses the phrase ‘whatever it takes’. While the Tories cling to gerontocratic socialism, redistributing wealth from young workers to older retirees,........

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