Of A Sort, Perhaps

Progress gives its verdict on Owen Smith: "This was the Soft Left's caper, and it had nothing to do with us."

Tony Blair is still too vain to call his latest move "retirement".

But he and David Miliband articulate the bewildered hurt of those who find themselves living in, or in their case observing, what William Hague might have called "a foreign land".

They do not know, like or recognise the Britain of the General Election result, of the election of Jeremy Corbyn, of the Conservatives' second place in Scotland, of the EU referendum result, of the Chilcot Report, of the elevation of Theresa May, of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee's evisceration of the war in Libya, and of the impending re-election of Jeremy Corbyn.

But that is the Britain that there is. There is no other.

Blair did not found the Labour Hard Right, and it will not die when he does. One wonders whether some of the people now running Progress, or who will run whatever comes after it, have ever even met him.

This may not be his Britain. But it does seem to be theirs. At least in the sense that they accept that this what Britain now is.