TONY BLAIR’S intervention in Labour’s leadership agony may be useful. The catastrophic policies he advocates will rightly be associated with the past, not the future.

Blair is right, of course, that “whether there is a leadership change or not is irrelevant if it doesn’t start with a policy debate.”

He’s right too that the party has an “almost infinite capacity for self-delusion” — though not in the sense he means, that it defaults to a left-wing “comfort zone” that puts it out of touch with voters. Actually Labour is rarely led from the left and when it was — under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 — it won by far its biggest popular vote this century.

The delusion suffuses our whole political Establishment, not just Labour, and the outmoded policies it defaults to are those of the Thatcherite consensus — deregulated markets (despite the bankers’ crash and Grenfell), privatisation (despite poorer delivery and higher prices from water to transport), diverting public money to the private sector through outsourcing (despite lengthening waiting lists and worse service across the NHS and social care).

And war. Blair stresses, as he did two decades ago, that the cornerstone of British policy should be to follow the United States, whatever it does. The disastrous attitude that took us into the Iraq war still holds sway multiple failed wars later, as Donald Trump struggles to extricate himself from another blood-drenched blunder in Iran.

Blair says Labour has abandoned the “centre ground.” The term is outdated, given polarisation to left and right: the Greens and Reform are surging in the polls, while the Liberal Democrats tread water.

In a crisis, the “centrists” swing right, never left: the right and the centre are united in their support for capitalism.

Blair’s “centre ground” is now to “drill, baby drill” regardless of climate change, to launch (yet another) crackdown on welfare and to suck up to Trump, whose regime says European civilisation is being erased by immigration and openly supports far-right opposition to the British government itself.

To imagine any of this will resolve Labour, or Britain’s, problems requires “an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion.”