Why would anybody care what Sir Anthony Blair says or thinks? This pitiable figure published a screed full of long words, which sounds as if it was written by a microwave oven, and the British political classes all began to chatter and shriek like macaque monkeys, as if something important had happened.

Like an architect whose buildings fall down, a car designer whose machines burst into flames, a scientist whose drugs don’t work, the Blair creature has lost any standing from which to criticise anybody or advise us to do anything. Even sensible ideas, emerging from his mouth, are immediately suspect.

If I headed any great cause or party, I would beg him not to support it. You might as well get King Herod to endorse baby food. I have long recommended that he and his henchmen took up careers as Trappist monks, but it seems I have to make the case again.

First is the war he joined in Iraq, which did not just ruin that country and fail in its aim, but which began the vast march of migrants from the Middle East to Europe which nobody knows how to stop.

Then there was his unhinged idea of raising the school-leaving age to 21, conscripting the young into fake universities which left them in so many cases jobless and in debt.

But I took a look at a few other examples of his supposed genius. During the ‘New Labour’ government, spending on benefits and so-called ‘tax credits’, a giant ultra-Left wealth redistribution scheme, rose by 62 per cent. Official government debt, including the scandalously deceptive ‘off the books’ borrowing of the Private Finance Initiative, rose by something like £250billion. Average house prices – an unofficial measure of real inflation, far truer than the Whitehall figure – tripled during Blair’s decade.

About 1.8million people were added to the UK population thanks to net immigration. This was probably the keystone of all Blair’s revolutionary actions. We know from the blurted statements of one Blairite apparatchik, Andrew Neather, that the New Labour inner circle wanted mass migration to change the country.

He wrote in 2009: ‘The deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year…was to open up the UK to mass migration’. Neather also revealed that early drafts of immigration policy documents ‘included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.

He recalled ‘coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

Well, who knows what its main purpose was? The Blair Cabinet was stuffed with unashamed former student Marxists, including Blair himself. Though at that time Blair kept his Oxford Trotskyism a deadly secret. But beyond doubt the enormous net immigration which he started has transformed the country in ways which still rumble and echo. Housing shortage, my foot.

I might also mention that when Blair walked into Downing Street, the Royal Navy still had 37 destroyers and frigates, compared with 22 when he quit.

And the man in charge of all this now poses as some sort of political genius. Bilge. Blair won in 1997 and kept office in 2001 through the feeble collapse of the Tories, who had forgotten what they were for.

He also benefited from two of the slickest and most dishonest election campaigns ever seen, furiously supported by the BBC. To this day, Blair remains largely unexamined as a person or as a politician. Which must be why he gets away with it.

If he’d just be quiet, I wouldn’t bother. But since he keeps on courting the spotlight, it really is time he was given proper scrutiny.

Drama misses grim reality of Soviet life

Oh, how I wanted the new TV spy series Ponies to be good.

The idea is great: two ill-matched young women, the widows of CIA spies killed in the line of duty, become spooks themselves in 1970s Moscow. They hope to find out what happened to their menfolk.

But I cannot stand it. It can’t decide whether to be serious or funny and so it is neither. And its idea of Moscow is hopelessly smooth and clean.

Nobody seems to grasp just how grim Communist Russia was. The ‘Soviet pub’ which features in the first episode serves vodka in glasses from a bar. What! Such places were carpeted with discarded fishbones (bring your own dried fish). You got your thin, acid beer from a coin-operated tube screwed to the wall, and drank it from a pickle jar, which you again provided.

No woman, and no KGB smoothie, would have dared enter.

Searching for the Gents in the bowels of the BBC HQ in London, I found this sign on a firmly closed door. Is it perhaps the new Director-General’s office? 

We must restore Western aid

The BBC’s excellent Radio 4 programme, From Our Own Correspondent, reported this week that an Afghan man, Saieed Ahmad, had recently sold his five-year-old daughter Shaiqa into marriage for about £2,400. This was to pay for a badly needed operation.

Other Afghans are selling their daughters, or trying to, to pay for food. The whole thing is grotesque beyond bearing. In Afghanistan today, according to the UN, three in four people cannot meet their basic needs. While the West was still trying to govern Afghanistan, Western aid helped the country’s many poor people to eat and live. Now it has been severely cut, mainly because we do not approve of the Taliban regime’s view of women.

What a cruel and stupid policy this is. The Taliban will not, I suspect, be influenced by it.

But many more small girls like Shaiqa will be sold into child marriage and domestic service, which is surely exactly what we do not wish to see. Restore the aid. Do it now.