LONDON — Every year, at the Labour Party’s Christmas bash, the DJ plays the same tune: "Things Can Only Get Better" by the pop group D:Ream. The soundtrack to Tony Blair’s first election campaign in 1997, it’s a reminder of Labour’s golden moment — sweeping into power with an unprecedented majority, a world of possibility open before it.

Even the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes couldn’t halt the tradition: When it was played Tuesday evening, the rank and file raced on to the dance floor while Corbyn’s team sat mutinously on the sidelines.

This is a bad time to be a Blairite. But it’s a worse time to be Tony Blair. His party has been captured by the very forces he sought, as leader, to expunge — on a platform based on the explicit rejection of everything he stood for. Blair’s pleas for his party to “turn back from the abyss” only enhanced Corbyn’s standing.

As a result, a leader who forced his party to reject its totemic commitment to the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” has been replaced by one who, at that same Christmas party, reached for a quote from Enver Hoxha, the first communist chief of state of Albania.

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But even before the Corbyn ascendancy, there was a sense that Blair, having dominated the British political scene for so long, had become almost peripheral to it.

True, the Cameron team were reported (usually by their enemies) to refer to Blair as "the Master," and eagerly absorbed the lessons he had to teach — not least in his 2011 memoir, "A Journey." Many of their policies, especially in education, were lifted from his. Yet it is hard to imagine (for example) Margaret Thatcher needing to write a piece headlined "In Defense of Thatcherism," as Blair did this week for Blairism in the Spectator.

This last week, indeed, showed the strange position that Blair occupies. It began with a piece on his website on the need to tackle extremism, followed by an interview with the Sunday Times, amplifying the point. Then came the Spectator piece and then, Friday, an appearance before Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, which is holding an inquiry on Britain’s dealing with Libya.

But it was hard to avoid the feeling that all of this was falling on fallow ground. It was striking that, at the select committee, not one member of his own party turned up to quiz their departed leader. And while the inquiry’s terms of reference focus on Cameron’s actions, its members could not resist interrogating Blair about his closeness to the regime — needling and nagging at him about his alleged attempts to "save Gaddafi," or the idea that justice for the dictator’s victims (such as Yvonne Fletcher, the policewoman shot in London during a protest at the Libyan embassy in 1984) had been subordinated to commercial interests.

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Why is there so little nostalgia for a politician who once shone and shimmered like Britain’s answer to Jack Kennedy? Largely, of course, because of the Iraq war, Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into which is still dragging on: For many on the British Left, his complicity with George W. Bush makes him not just a stooge but a murderer, plain and simple.

Partly, because Cameron has been an assiduous enough student to fill the Blair-shaped hole in public life. And partly also because, in the end, people did get tired of Tony — of “look,” and “y’know” and “let’s be clear,” and the endless forceful hand gestures.

But there’s something else, too. If you asked Blair himself, he would describe his post-office career in terms of his role in the Middle East, his faith foundation, the good causes he promotes. But alongside that was an apparent devotion to self-enrichment — to private jets and large houses and deals to advise big banks and dodgy dictators.

Above all, the impression was of a leader who felt that British politics was, by the end, too small for him. Blair didn’t just leave office: He quit Parliament with immediate effect. Before the Middle East post, there was talk of a big job running Europe; whenever he appeared in the news, it was in one foreign country or another. But this assimilation into the global elite came at a price: When he intervened in British politics, the impression was of the boyfriend who left you for someone better (American fella, called George).

In some hearts, the flame still burns. Those Labour Party staffers on the dance floor still chant “Tony! Tony! Tony!” when D:Ream starts up. When Blair left the select committee hearing, the public mobbed him for selfies. A 2010 survey of academics judged him Britain’s third most successful postwar prime minister. And while his legacy is scorned and dismissed on the Left, his doctrines still command much of the center ground, not least thanks to his fans among the Conservatives.

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But the position Blair finds himself in is hardly one to envy. Stay silent about British politics, and he is accused of not caring. Intervene, and he is told to shut his warmongering trap. He can’t have any influence within his old party, because it’s now led by those who are determined to eradicate every shred of Blair. And he’s still got to suffer through the publication of the Chilcot report — which, even if it doesn’t condemn him for his part in the Iraq War, will stir up all those who’d still like to see him in The Hague (including, again, many of those within his own party).

A leaked memo from Blair’s team once urged him “to go with the crowds wanting more… he should be the star who won't even play that last encore.”

At the moment, he can’t step on stage without being booed off. Things can only get better? He must be hoping so.

Robert Colvile is a former head of comment at the Daily Telegraph and was most recently news director of BuzzFeed U.K.