As Britain enters the jingoistic, ill-tempered final phase of its forty-four-year membership in the European Union, the early years of Tony Blair’s New Labour government, in the late nineteen-nineties, occur in the mind as a painful and unlikely memory. Back then, a young, snaggletoothed Prime Minister took his family on vacations to Tuscany; he addressed the French National Assembly in French; and the country briefly considered discarding the pound for the euro. The love between London and Brussels was never so strong.

The affection waned, on both sides, during Blair’s eventful decade in office. But, when the former Prime Minister sat down with his family—he and his wife, Cherie, have four grown children—in his London town house to watch the results of Britain’s E.U. referendum, last June, he was confident that the country would choose to maintain its single most important international relationship. “I thought in the end, partly for reasons of safety first, people would vote to stay,” he told me recently. As the votes mounted for Brexit, a startled Blair picked up the phone. “I spoke to various people—they should probably remain private, who they were,” he said. “Just to see what on earth we could do.”

Blair stepped down as Prime Minister in June, 2007, less than three months before the first run on a British bank since 1866, leaving behind an overstretched military fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. After handing power to his long-term heir and chancellor, Gordon Brown, he became a kind of roving, Davosian statesman. In 2008, while Brown was consumed by the financial crisis, Blair taught “Faith and Globalization,” a course at Yale. Until 2015, Blair was officially engaged as a peace envoy for the “Quartet”—Russia, the U.N., the U.S., and the E.U.—in the dispiriting search for a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians. But he also found time to set up a network of consulting companies and foundations under the umbrella of Tony Blair Associates, with staff in twenty countries. Blair’s Windrush Ventures, a government-advisory service, had a turnover of £19.5 million in 2015. Blair himself is paid a reported retainer of two million pounds a year, by the bank JPMorgan. The Guardian estimates that the Blair family’s property portfolio alone is worth twenty-seven million pounds.

During his lucrative wanderings, Blair largely stayed out of domestic politics. Meanwhile, Labour went from running the country to a diminished and divided opposition party under its current left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn. The Brexit vote, and the attendant rise of populist forces across Europe and the U.S. in the second half of 2016, prompted Blair to reconsider his detachment. “I was always very anxious about the state of the Labour Party and, to a degree, wanted to participate in that,” he said. “But, until Brexit, I didn’t feel there was something that compelled me.”

Blair’s fixation now is to reinvigorate what he calls the “progressive center”—to find policies and arguments that can reassure populations in Europe and the U.S. about the benefits of globalization and the rapid march of technology. He eschews traditional political labels such as left or right, liberal or conservative, preferring the dichotomy “open versus closed” to describe what is happening in the world today. “This is what interests me,” Blair said. “Is it possible to define a politics that is what I would call post-ideological?” Late last year, he rebranded Tony Blair Associates into the new, pro-bono Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in order to pursue this goal. For the first time in a decade, Blair also resumed speaking directly to the British public. In February, he addressed Open Britain, a group formed out of the ashes of last year’s Remain campaign, to encourage the forty-eight per cent of voters who opposed Brexit to “rise up” and overturn the outcome. “I don’t know if we can succeed,” Blair said. “But I do know we will suffer a rancorous verdict from future generations if we do not try.”

Almost a year after the referendum, the country is about to go through with it, embarking on the labyrinthine negotiations to exit the E.U. It is a moment of maximum opportunity or maximum terror, depending on your point of view. Last month, Theresa May, the Conservative Prime Minister, called a snap general election, to be held on June 8th, to shore up support for her hard-line approach to the talks. May has already promised to withdraw the U.K. from the E.U.’s single market, which accounts for half of the country’s trade. Blair, like many in educated and metropolitan circles, is horrified. “It is a catastrophic mistake, and my anxiety is that it will be too late before we realize that,” he said.

The former Labour leader’s position is much clearer than that of Corbyn’s party, which, in attempting to honor the result of the referendum and oppose May’s government at the same time, has ended up confusing many voters. Pushing his own anti-Brexit argument, Blair has emerged as one of the strongest and most regular pro-E.U. voices in the current election campaign. By coincidence, the twentieth anniversary of New Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 also fell last week, causing its own ripple of reflections about how the U.K. has changed and what might have been. Blair has not been so ubiquitous since he was in power.

It is impossible not to fantasize about a second coming. British politics, for the most part, is a dingy scene these days, completely dominated by May, a cautious and uneasy figure. The enormousness of Brexit dwarfs its protagonists; Blair liked nothing more than a big occasion. Over the weekend, focus groups carried out by HuffPost U.K. brought back news of a “Tony Blair-shaped hole” in the political landscape. “There is no politician with his rhetorical skills or the ability he once had to connect with the common sense of the time,” James Morris, a pollster, wrote. Blair’s gift, like Bill Clinton’s, was to confound the country’s political boundaries for a time. He inspired a generation of followers in all parties. David Cameron, the Conservative Prime Minister defenestrated by Brexit, and his chancellor, George Osborne, were both self-confessed Blairites. In private, Osborne used to call Blair “the Master.”

Blair and I met on an unseasonably cold recent morning, at No. 9 Grosvenor Square, the town house that has served as Blair’s London headquarters since he left office. The house, a few hundred yards from the American Embassy, once belonged to John Adams, the second U.S. President and the first Ambassador to Britain. It was decorated in a generic expensive style. Orchids rose from occasional side tables. Behind Blair’s shoulder was a painting of children playing soccer in Africa. Often, he looked past me, to the leaves of the plane trees outside, when considering a question. At one point, Blair, who is sixty-four and tanned, described the harsh choice facing British voters at next month’s election: between the risky Brexit agenda of the Conservatives and the left-wing irrelevance of Corbyn’s Labour. “There are millions of politically homeless people in that scenario,” he remarked. The old antennae twitched.

It is an uncanny thing for British liberals to behold, this return of Blair. You think you are over someone, and then, here he is. Blair has a way of clasping his index finger to his thumb and flicking his hand to underline the point he is making, which, when you see it again, if you are old enough, transports you back fifteen years. More than any other thing, though, it is the sound of him. One of Blair’s defining qualities as a British politician was his indeterminacy: of place, of background, of ideology. And his voice was the ultimate classless artifact. When Blair speaks, he often drops his “T”s—“that” becomes “tha”—which sounds common, but, when he is roused, or giving a televised speech, he often finds a higher, plaintive pitch, like an actor reading Tennyson. “How hideously, in this debate, is the mantle of patriotism abused,” Blair said during his comeback speech, in February.