Tony Blair, the ghost of ‘Prime Minister’s Past’, comes out of the cupboard to frighten us over Brexit!

I was interested in the coverage over last weekend of Tony Blair’s foray in the Brexit debate. All the commentators and papers seem to be reporting that he is very much “yesterday’s man” and that nobody was listening to what he had to say. I thought that was an interesting deflection from the likely purpose of his intervention.

The first thing that we need to bear in mind and accept about Tony Blair is that he remains one of the slickest British political operators of recent times. The idea that he has completely lost his touch at his age is frankly incredible.

So what was he trying to achieve? Well for a start the “people” that he was calling on to “rise up” were not you or I. He was, no doubt, focussed on supporting his old friends Peter Mandelson and Peter Hains and the motley crew of Europhile/Remainiac Lords to “rise up” and use their undemocratic position in the Upper Chamber of our legislature to block the democratic vote.

This is of course exactly the sort of thing that so-called “liberal democracy” is all about, whereby the institutions of the State have a role in preventing “we the People” from getting our way on anything which the British Political Establishment doesn’t think we ought to get our way on. This is normally done behind closed doors with an orchestrated effort by the mainstream media to bamboozle us in to thinking that it is done as a result of a mass demand, rather than just because of a small gang of elitists.

Given the decisive EU referendum result, that covert option is not open to Remainers.

Blair would have been well aware of this and has put himself up to be the “scapegoat” and “whipping boy” for those of us who do not like what he was saying, whilst at the same time emboldening the Remainers opposition in the House of Lords.

It is an often ignored part of politics that by standing up for what you believe in, you do embolden others to do the same. This works just as well for those of us in “insurgent” parties as for those in the Establishment.

I firmly believe that Blair’s behaviour is better explained by a calculated effort to take the flack and thus embolden more of a protractive Remainers’ battle in the House of Lords than would otherwise have happened.

We will have to see over the course of the next few weeks how effective that call has been!