I used to worship Tony Blair. Throughout the ’90s I was a card-carrying ‘traditional values in a modern setting’ proselytising New Labour evangelist. I once bought a fawn-coloured suit because that’s what Tony had taken to wearing, in radical defiance of Westminster convention.

So it genuinely pains me to say this. But after reading his 5,000-word essay – which has been treated by some political observers with an awe and reverence akin to Moses delivering the tablets from Mount Sinai – it’s clear my hero has completely lost his mind.

They say the definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over again, while expecting a different result. Yet the primary problem with Blair’s prescription for the ills assailing the country isn’t that he actually expects a better outcome from the failed policies of the past.

It’s that he just doesn’t care. So long as they align with his personal ideology – or perhaps more significantly, the ideology of those chucking millions in the direction of the Tony Blair Institute – he’ll happily make the case.

When I heard he had penned his opus rebutting criticism of the charge the nation had spent 40 years on the wrong path, I was keen to see how he’d address the defining moments of that period. Iraq. The Banking Implosion. Brexit. Unchecked immigration. The hollowing out of entire communities and regions.

Blair dealt with them in a simple way. By pretending they never happened at all. Take the section on relations with the US. There is no humility, obviously. Or contrition. Or even a basic acknowledgement of how his catastrophic Iraq adventure was the single greatest British foreign policy disaster since the war, and did more than anything to destroy the status of the Special Relationship in the eyes of the British people and the wider world.

Instead, he deploys an analogy. We should all think of Donald Trump as a bus driver confronted with a brick wall, he explains. Most leaders would pause and think of how to get round the wall. Not Trump.

‘He drives down the road, sees the brick wall and accelerates. Yes, there are bits flying off the bus, there is a fair amount of debris and damage, the passengers feel mildly nauseous, but, with luck, he’s through the wall,’ Blair states admiringly.

And what should Britain do, when confronted with this driver who has clearly lost his marbles? Jump right on board, Blair insists. Because, in his words, ‘America remains the indispensable core of Britain’s security alliance. But staying with it means even when it is difficult or unpopular’.

In 2002 Blair said Britain should pay ‘the blood price’ to stay in lockstep with the US.

And a quarter of a century later, despite the carnage and chaos and instability Iraq unleashed, he still believes it.

He adopts a similarly delusional approach to Europe. Again, there is no attempt to address the underlying reasons the British people – many of whom had initially entrusted him with their votes – opted to reject the pro-European zeal that defined his time as Prime Minister. Instead, he simply dismisses the decision to leave with the off-hand observation ‘Britain has lost from Brexit’.

But he then goes on to construct a fantasy world, one in which Britain forces its way back into the EU, but on our terms.

‘Any structured relationship will require a negotiation,’ he insists, ‘and that negotiation will have to be from strength and not from weakness’.

This is the mirage zealots in both camps have been chasing ever since the Brexit debate began.

The ‘Europe needs us more than we need Europe’ delusion. It has zero basis in reality. Brussels’ starting, middle and end point of any significant renegotiation will be, ‘if you won’t accept free movement, don’t bother to pick up the phone’.

But Blair cannot acknowledge this reality. To do so would require him to confront another taboo. Immigration is the defining political issue of the moment. So again, he barely addresses it.

The way he used unchecked migration as a direct tool for controlling inflation via the suppression of the wages of millions of working people.

Of how this in turn squandered the real gains in GDP his government secured, funnelling them into increasingly narrow enclaves of wealth. Whilst simultaneously creating a sense of economic, social and cultural alienation that has come close to tearing Britain in two.

On all this, there is nothing. Save for an embarrassed silence.

Soon after I read Blair’s encyclical I spoke to a former aide who like me had been a fully paid-up member of the New Labour fan club.

‘The problem is Tony’s skill used to be his ability to judge the mood of the British people,’ he said. ‘And that’s gone. He spends all his time hanging out with his millionaire clients and flying round on their private jets.

‘He hasn’t got the faintest idea what ordinary people are thinking any more.’ Since he left office I’m not sure how often Tony Blair has been back to his old constituency in Sedgefield, County Durham.

I’ve been a couple of times. And to many of the other parts of the country that represented the vaunted Red Wall that sustained him in power.

But if he did take a break from circling the globe, gladhanding the tech bros and neo-cons who fund his cherished institute, he would hear this.

People are sick of the status quo. They have had it with being told the failed prescriptions of the past really will work this time, if only they would shut up and take their medicine.

And they want no more lectures – or essays – from members of an elite that see them simply as marks in their latest global shell game.

The problem with the grand architect of New Labour is that when you scratch the surface of his self-justifying dissertation you realise he has nothing new to say.

He left office insisting there was no alternative to unfettered globalisation. And now that has been discredited, his new mantra is that there is no alternative to unfettered automation.

Blair once told the working people of Britain they had no choice but to sit back and let the migrants take their jobs. This time round it’s the machines.

AI is the future, he proclaims. It must be allowed to let rip, free from any significant regulatory control. And anyone who objects is a Luddite or a Communist, or – even worse – Andy Burnham.

When Tony Blair was elected in 1997 he said in his first address as Prime Minister: ‘This is not a mandate for dogma or for doctrine, or for a return to the past.’ Sadly dogma, doctrine and a craving for the past are all my old hero has left.