Blair presses the nuclear button
Whenever Tony Blair starts to seem irrelevant, whenever it appears that we are all concentrating on what happens after he has moved on, Blair the magician appears with a right wing agenda so outrageous that we have to abandon our plans for a new future and find ourselves having to face down his latest outrage.
It's the only way Blair knows of keeping himself relevant.
So it should come as no surprise that this has been his reaction to a set of local election results that would have made any other long serving leader consider whether or not they had reached their sell by date.
Blair's instant reaction to this was to make a cabinet reshuffle that was so brutal that it became the headlines, in a crude attempt to imply that the problem lay with others but that Tony had sorted it all out.
When that failed, and when the challenges from within his own party for him to step down continued, he launched an assault on the human rights act - that his OWN government enacted - demanding that the government have the power to overrule court decisions that it disagreed with.
Now he has, literally, pressed the nuclear button.
Last night he ignited a fierce debate within his own cabinet when he stated the Britain would need a new generation of nuclear power stations.
In his speech last night Mr Blair said: "Essentially, the twin pressures of climate change and energy security are raising energy policy to the top of the agenda in the UK and around the world.
"The facts are stark. By 2025, if current policy is unchanged there will be a dramatic gap on our targets to reduce CO2 emissions, we will become heavily dependent on gas and at the same time move from being 80% to 90% self-reliant in gas to 80% to 90% dependent on foreign imports, mostly from the Middle East, and Africa and Russia.
"These facts put the replacement of nuclear power stations, a big push on renewables and a step change on energy efficiency, engaging both business and consumers, back on the agenda with a vengeance. If we don't take these long-term decisions now we will be committing a serious dereliction of our duty to the future of this country."
I'm not even going to engage in the debate of whether or not Britain should renew her nuclear power plants, as I think that is exactly Blair's intention by hitting his third right wing contentious issue in such a short space of time.
He's hitting the bottom of the pond, in the hope of muddying the water, and stopping the debate that has been happening about when he should step down.
However, for people like myself, the more he ploughs this furrow, the more convinced the left become that his removal from office is becoming an imperative.
Click title for Guardian coverage.
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