I've always hated Tony Blair, but in this mad world even I'm glad to see him back

Blair will benefit from the Persil President. Even if he can’t remove the most gruesome stains from our world leaders, he’ll fade them by comparison until they look wearably off-white again

If there is one thing the country needs now (apart from a Brexit strategy, massively increased NHS investment, and the other items on the UK’s bucket list), it’s a leader prepared to stand up to a terrifyingly right-wing US President.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present Mr Tony “Yo” Blair. Refreshed by his sojourn making a few bob and sprinkling peace across the Middle East, Blair is plotting the most sensational comeback since Muhammed Ali knocked out George Foreman in Kinshasa.

The former PM reveals that early next year he will launch a new organisation, as yet unnamed, with three aims. One is openly stated, the other two covert.

The formal ambition of what we’ll call the Blair Phoenix Foundation (BPF) is to rouse the centre left from its coma by injecting it with the L-Dopa of his unique political talent.

One unofficial intent is to launder the reputation of Blair, which he apparently regards as “recoverable”. In this field, he has lucrative experience on behalf of central Asian dictators. Now he’s jacked in the money-grubbing, why not use it on himself?

The official ambition is splendid. Without a viable, electable centrist party, we will never slip the bonds of one-party statehood. Even those who admire much about the current Labour leader, as I do, should accept that an endemically centre-right country will not elect Jeremy Corbyn. If the next election is the expected bloodbath, and the membership re-elects Corbyn or replaces him with someone of like mind, a vast chunk of surviving MPs will have to leave and join a new party.

The BPF looks to me like Blair positioning himself for such a moment. For now, he has nothing to say either about that or whether a third goal is to install him as leader of a new, SDP-style centrist alliance. But no one ever looked smart by underestimating the generic politician’s lack of self-awareness, let alone one who reportedly (he denies it) called Corbyn “a nutter”.

What Blair does say is that the BPF’s remit will extend beyond campaigning against Brexit to analysing the global forces behind it and the general weakening of the centre left.

You suspect his vision will be a touch blinkered. With the causes of Brexit, for instance, he may not fixate on the invasion of Iraq and ensuing regional destabilisation that led to the migrant diaspora to Europe; or on resentment caused by the mega rich snaffling almost every last farthing of GDP growth for so long at the expense of wage stagnation. As for the centre left’s decline, you can expect him to gloss over how he contemptuously ignored Labour’s traditional voters in the north and Scotland, reckoning they had nowhere else to go, and lavished all the love on soft Tories in the south.

Not so long ago, the notion that Blair even belonged to the centre left seemed fanciful. But the centre ground has shifted so far to the right that I could almost swear I remember Margaret Thatcher leading a Tory Conference in a lusty rendition of “The Red Flag”.

The Trump Terror is already altering perceptions of those we used to regard as reactionary horrors. When a President-elect appoints a Confederate flag-waver as attorney-general, how do you not see the George W Bush who made Colin Powell and Condi Rice secretaries of state in a softer light?

Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz were gruesome warmongers, but they were sinister figures from our own reality, not shape-shifting alien invaders like Steve Bannon. Cheney would have unloaded his hunting rifle on Dubya before he let him tweet the demand that Nigel Farage become His Excellency in Washington.

In this dispiriting early winter, as you stagger about beneath the weight of the Brexit-Trump axis, Tony Blair begins to sound like a consoling voice of sanity in a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

For all that, Blair’s chronic self-delusion and refusal to confront his mistakes, even after Chilcot, prevents him laundering his reputation himself. But he will benefit from the advent of the Persil President. If Blair cannot entirely remove the most gruesome stains from world leaders of recent years, he will fade them by comparison until they look wearably off-white again.

This kind of historical relativism is nothing new. It’s why Tiberius, with his reputation in mind, made the even more hateful Caligula his imperial heir. But it is worth the effort of resisting. With Blair, the effort shouldn’t be too draining. Last week, he was spotted in New York with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law and a major power behind the iron throne.

Why he was dining with the Hand of the King is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was purely social. But Blair has supped with a presidential devil before, not with a long spoon but hovering around the table legs waiting for the gristle from the neo-liberal sirloin. If he is aching for one final big job, it would more fittingly be at the pleasure of a borderline neo-fascist than as the self-appointed saviour of a centre-left he did so much himself to destroy.