PERHAPS you have spent some time over the last month celebrating the 25th anniversary of New Labour’s advent in power. No, me neither.

Nor Tony Blair, as it turns out. He spent the day in question in the Bahamas, speaking at a conference about cryptocurrencies, although I doubt if he was remunerated in Non-Fungible Tokens.  

But no matter. You can enjoy the thrill all over again with the Britain Project, the former Labour leader’s new wheeze, launching shortly.

This is apparently inspired by French President Emmanuel Macron’s rebranded centrist movement, which was anyway barely sufficient to secure his recent re-election against the far-right Marine Le Pen.

Yet it is also not going to be a political party, which Macron’s renaissance definitely is. Still, if I was Keir Starmer — horrifying thought — I would be a tad worried.

After all, Starmer could not have done more to try and bring Blairism back to life in the Labour Party.

He has promoted Blairites to the front bench and dumped any left-of-Blair policy or person within reach. He has even re-enthroned Peter Mandelson as top adviser, luring Blair’s Svengali off oligarchs’ yachts for the purpose.

Yet core Blairites seem to remain unconvinced. The Labour leader is definitely deficient in the one quality in which Blair and Macron once excelled: charisma. He does not look like a winner. So the Britain Project is perhaps Plan B, a fallback.

And what a team the Project has assembled! There is Angela Smith, the MP and privatised water industry lobbyist who was last heard of discussing people with “a funny tinge” on the day she abandoned Labour.

There is a bloke who advised William Hague on strategy when he was Tory leader — that went well — and even someone who wrote speeches for Paddy Ashdown. There are one-time MPs from all parties on hand, all of whom have lost their seats.

The stated mission is to make moderation exciting and hold the line against encroaching populism. It won’t go well. If right populism is a menace, stouter ramparts than Smith are required.

One of those involved says it is closer to a “dreary think tank” than a new party. The adjective seems apposite whatever the noun.

The same person puts their finger on the problem: “The Labour right and the Tory left have been deficient intellectually for quite a long time. The only ideas in British politics, like it or not, have come from the Tory right and the Labour left.”

The Britain Project, with its blather about “hope, decency and integrity” will not remedy the intellectual deficiency.

The rewards for bland rhetoric were paid out 25 years ago by New Labour in missed opportunities, neoliberalism and, ultimately, war.

No need to repeat the tragedy. Farce is already at hand it seems.

Ivanova’s hammer and sickle was not for Putin

A STATUE has been erected to Anna Ivanova in shattered Mariupol. Murals of her are proliferating. But she is not a happy woman.

Ivanova, who lives near Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, had fame thrust upon her when she greeted advancing Russian troops by waving the Soviet flag.

Only the troops weren’t Russian but Ukrainian, and they disrespected the elderly woman’s flag, while nevertheless giving her an emergency food parcel.

This was the flag under which her parents had fought, she remonstrated in scenes caught on camera.

She is now a heroine among Russians. “She is the symbol of the fight against Nazism and fascism, she has become the grandmother for all of Donbass and for all of Russia,” a Putin flunkey declaimed.

The heroic grandmother has gone off script, however. “I wish I could call Putin and tell him: Why was it impossible to solve this question without war, so neither their boys nor ours would have to die?

“What have we, Ukraine, done to Russia so they have to kill us? Russia started it. Ukraine didn’t touch them.”

Since her house has lost its roof and windows as a result of Russian shelling this lack of enthusiasm for Putin’s war is unsurprising.

What she does like, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, is the Soviet Union. Her life has deteriorated on every index since it was liquidated.

It is a poignant story. The grandparents of the Ukrainian troops she encountered probably fought for the USSR too.

Soviet power had its shortcomings, including in the realm of inter-ethnic relations, but it was evidently an improvement on the horrors imposed by oligarchic nationalist rule in Moscow and Kiev.

As for the flag, Italian Communist Vittorio Vidali reflected as he walked past the Kremlin on a cold winter night in 1956: “The flag was there. May it always wave victorious! May it wave tomorrow over all the world — a world rid of all the ugliness…”

Sixty-six years on, and much more ugliness. Still the Anna Ivanovas reach for that flag.

Serving power, protecting the system

IF you are in trouble, try to find a police officer, I was told as a child. It is never advice I have followed, since it quickly became clear that, too often, the police were the trouble.

Still, it seems to work for Boris Johnson. If he remains prime minister, it is the Met he must thank.

First it declined to probe his conversion of Downing Street during lockdown into the Hacienda on a Friday night.

Then, as the political pressure became unsustainable, it announced it would inquire after all, kicking the whole issue into the long grass.

Incomprehensibly, it then declined to fine him for most of the events at which he appeared to act as Lord of Misrule, even while others were punished for attending.

Some of the parties in the Downing Street flat it did not even look into. It thus pre-empted the report by civil servant Sue Gray, allowing Johnson to move straight from “wait for the report” to “it’s time to move on” without pause.

The Met motto — speak power to truth. And Starmer will get off too, I’ll wager. Job done.

This column appears fortnightly.