Amid the din of the referendum campaign you can hear the unmistakable sound of Tony Blair spinning. With John Chilcot finally about to release his report into the Iraq war – a mere 13 years after the calamitous invasion – Blair is in full-blown reputation salvage mode. In his latest PR offensive (in every sense of that word), he is apparently briefing that his opponents should consider what would have happened if Saddam Hussein had remained in power. This line of argument is akin to throwing someone off a cliff and then claiming as a defence that somebody else would probably have pushed him off anyway.

Blair’s defenders – who you are more likely to find in the media than in the general population – are deeply irritated by any pushback to his finely honed spin. They believe Blair’s leftwing critics are possessed by an irrational collective madness. Because he won elections, his detractors should really just express blind gratitude.

This is not a line of argument Blair’s remaining supporters would apply to, say, Ken Livingstone. Iraq, for Blair’s champions, is no big deal, a topic worthy of a yawn … why can’t we just move on from it? Hundreds of thousands of dead (179 British soldiers among them), millions injured and displaced, the rise of the horror of Islamic State: these are all apparently insufficient grounds to have something of a grudge against Tony Blair.

That he spent the last few years amassing millions of pounds in the service of dictators – such as Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev, who Blair offered PR advice after his tyrant client regime massacred striking workers – is worthy of nothing but an eye-roll. After all, Blair won a landslide victory in 1997, so there is nothing else to say.

In another world, being paid millions to work for dictators who kill their opponents, let alone orchestrating an invasion that has produced blood and chaos on an industrial scale, would be sufficient grounds to retire from public life.

But you would expect me to say this. In actual fact, it would be good for his own champions. If Blairites want a political future, they need to divorce themselves from Blair. His very presence renders them politically toxic. That’s not just the case among the Labour party membership: in a poll last year that asked whether Britons regarded him as a political liability or asset, he garnered a net minus 47; while research last month suggested 53% of Britons said they could never forgive Blair. During the Labour leadership contest, Blair effectively became Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign manager.

An obvious Blairite response is that Labour will never recover if it trashes its own political record. But New Labour did not present itself as continuity with Harold Wilson’s leadership in the 1960s and 1970s. When Tony Blair became leader, he did not call himself a “Wilsonite”. New Labour effectively presented itself as year zero.

“In claiming ‘New’ Labour to be literally a new party,” as Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson put it, “Blair affected to disparage an ‘Old’ Labour that compromised not only the Bennite left but also the Wilson-Callaghan leadership, the former for their extremism and the latter for its reliance on state intervention and subordination to the unions.” The right of the party argue electoral success is their unique selling point. But they will never win their own party over – let alone the country – if they maintain their blind adoration of Blair.

The Blairite thing to do is to divorce from Blair and, instead of harking back to the past, establish something fresh for the future. And, preferably, tell Blair to cease and desist.