WITH Tony Blair’s criticism of Labour Party leaders and early enthusiastic support for Donald Trump’s bungled US invasion of Iran, should Blair be finally cast out of the Labour Party?

To say the former “New” Labour prime minister is a Marmite figure is something of an understatement. For some, he is the last competent British PM, with an impressive list of achievements to his name, gifted with insight into world affairs and how to leverage Britain’s place in it.

To many others he’s the grinning toady that dragged the country into George W Bush’s Iraq war, hocked the family silver with innumerable PPP schemes and grifted his post-premiership career cozying up to tech bros, oligarchs, shady foreign regimes and seemingly just about anyone who can line his pockets.

And lest we forget, his presence on Trump’s extortion outfit the “Board of Peace” and his bizarro previous eight-year stint (2007-15) as Middle East envoy for the Quartet of international powers (the US, EU, Russia and the UN), which appeared to achieve precisely f*** all, to use the vernacular.

With Blair’s slating of the British government, hypocrisy and his slavish obeisance to Trump, Blair resembles no-one more than the odious French turncoat Pierre Laval, the chief architect of the Vichy puppet state’s active collaboration with Nazi Germany during WWII.

Like Blair (and of course Starmer), Laval was trained as a lawyer, beginning his political life before cynically tacking to the right, big money and those who he perceived as winners in the game of life. Laval collaborated in the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps, although he claimed he thought they were to be used as forced labour, rather than exterminated.

After the war, Laval was tried and executed for treason on October 15 1945. Many have argued for Blair to face trial for his role in the Iraq war, but that has yet to happen, the closest being C4’s satirical drama The Trial of Tony Blair (2007), where he is arraigned at The Hague for war crimes.

The full drama is currently available on YouTube.

Incidentally, in Last War Against France: Fighting Vichy 1940-42 (2009) by Colin Smith, “the arch-politician Pierre Laval, is transformed into a chain-smoking, duplicitous Tony Blair,” according to Carmen Callil in The Guardian.

In fiction, Blair bears a passing resemblance to Kenneth Widmerpool from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time novel cycle. He worms his way through life via determination and a natural gift for aligning himself with the dominant power in any given situation, securing success in business and politics, winning himself a life peerage, when they supposedly meant something. A prize that still eludes equally avaricious Blair.

However, Widmerpool’s life spirals as he later becomes entangled in Scorpio Murtlock’s sex cult and meets a fitting end, suffering a heart attack while running half-naked through the woods as part of one of the sect’s bizarre rituals.

Blair apparently can’t compete with this side of Widmerpool’s life, although it should be noted that there were rumours of Tone’s dalliances with Wendi Deng Murdoch and Israeli heiress/tycoon Ofra Strauss.

And as we know, Blair officially converted to Roman Catholicism in December 2007, which may not come under the strict definition of a “sex cult.” In the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war, then prime minister Blair anticipated Trump in criticising the Pope, claiming the invasion was morally justified to enforce UN authority and protect the Iraqi people. Pope John Paul II had vehemently opposed military action on moral grounds.

With all the new-found respect for Blair in the Tory press, it appears that the former PM’s patronage of the appalling Peter Mandelson has been conveniently forgotten. Doubtless Mandelson would love to be compared to those substantial eminences grises of history, such as Talleyrand, Richelieu or Metternich, but another name from the past springs to mind regarding the sacked British ambassador to the US. That would be the vile Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s greedy depraved lackey and sadistic NKVD chief.

Also, Martin Bormann and Marcia Falkender (Harold Wilson’s political secretary), at a pinch.

Whether any of the above-mentioned figures were ever fined for urinating in public (as was Mandelson) is unknown.