A British MP once asked Tony Blair why the then-prime minister had been so successful. “Because I’m not seen as being as left-wing as you lot,” was Blair’s reply. The MP he was talking to was a Conservative.

So ran a joke I remember from the 1990s or early 2000s on the satirical panel show Have I Got News For You, which, like Blair himself, is still going after all these years. I was reminded of the gag this past week as the former prime minister published a 5,000-word essay accusing the Labour Party he once led of “playing with fire” by rushing into a leadership contest without what he deems a serious debate on policy.

Any serious analysis of the current world and immediate future has to engage with hard realities that cannot be wished away, Blair argues. These hard facts include two “epochal” changes: first, a new world of two or three great powers in open competition (the US, China and soon India) and the relative decline of “middle powers” such as the UK; and second, rapid technological change, especially artificial intelligence.

This diagnosis itself is hardly controversial but the remedies Blair demands indicate how far he has travelled from the leadership of a centre-left political party and into his role as consigliere of choice to the billionaire class, where the only meaningful currency is power.

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So urgent is the competition for AI-leadership in business, he insists, that virtually any other imperative that might impede tech company growth – prioritising clean energy, advancing........

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