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Say what you will about Tony Blair, but the man’s not a quitter. Not content with being repeatedly wrong in his reflexive advice for politicians to tack to the right, Blair doubled down in a recent interview with Politico, warning against the rise of left-wing populism. Free public services, he said, were “very attractive,” but “I’m not sure it would win an election” — though if it did, he noted, “it would worry me” because “a lot of these solutions aren’t really progressive” and “don’t correspond to what the problem of the modern world is.” Later in the same interview, Blair insisted that Democrats try to work with Trump. As the website noted, Blair “still punches hardest when he’s hitting to his left.” We’ve been hearing a lot about what’s progressive and what isn’t from Blair of late. Spooked by the Brexit result, Blair has embarked on a project to inject himself back into British and global politics after a ten-year leave of absence that was first made necessary by his toxic standing among the general public. Ever the “radical centrist,” Blair has developed a “post-ideological” plan to educate the public about the merits of technological advances and globalization. He’s rebranded his firm, Tony Blair Associates, as the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and oriented it towards this goal. He’s teamed up with Open Britain, an outgrowth of last year’s failed Remain campaign that’s working to halt Brexit, and was for a time working with centrist Labour MPs to break away from the party and form a new movement after what they (wrongly) predicted would be a Tory landslide. This isn’t the first time Blair has waded back into British politics. Labour routinely trotted him out in election years to give his endorsement to the latest Labour prime-minister-to-be, while Blair himself has taken every opportunity to warn Labour against moving leftward (a piece of advice he also disastrously imparted to Hillary Clinton during her 2016 run). But his new role is, by Blair’s own admission, a more fully committed dive back into politics than at any time in these intervening years. Yet Blair is the last person anyone should listen to about politics in 2017. For of all the shady post-political careers that Western world leaders have embarked on in recent years, Blair’s is perhaps the shadiest. Few have cashed out like Blair has since leaving 10 Downing Street, operating a dizzying, and often overlapping, web of charities, firms, and foundations that have catapulted him to the status of one of Britain’s wealthiest people. In the mere ten years he’s been out of office, he’s become the living, breathing symbol of the money-grubbing, self-serving political establishment that the public he now seeks to persuade, loathes. He’s made the kind of money that Barack Obama can only dream of. He’s mixed private enrichment with public service in a way that would make the Clintons blush. And he’s racked up a list of unseemly clients that Henry Kissinger would drool over. What follows is an extremely condensed history of Tony Blair’s post-prime ministerial career.

Tangled up in Green What made it especially difficult for Blair to separate his public and private business was the fact that, along with his charities, Blair was also running Tony Blair Associates, a for-profit consultancy firm that made up a significant source of Blair’s income. What exactly did TBA do? For one, it was in the business of “providing introductions,” bringing corporate clients and governments together to set up business deals. For instance, it was alleged that Blair introduced a Chinese businessman wanted by Interpol for bribery to the Abu Dhabi royal family, for a deal worth $3 billion. In 2012, he tried to broker a deal between an Irish businessman and the Qatari royal family, something the businessman said TBA was doing “out of the good of their heart.” Blair was also pitched to PetroSaudi, a privately owned oil firm co-founded by a Saudi prince, as someone who could “unlock situations which might otherwise be blocked by political factors.” He went onto promote the company in private meetings with Chinese officials — all for a $100,000 per month retainer. To illustrate how tangled Blair’s various activities were at the time: he was, at this point, still serving as the Middle East peace envoy; many of his meetings with Chinese officials happened while he was visiting on behalf of his religious charity; and TBA’s director assured PetroSaudi that it made no difference if they paid money to the firm that owned TBA or the firm that owned his charities, “given where the cash ultimately ends up.” (Blair’s deal with PetroSaudi came with an added scent of impropriety, given that as prime minister, Blair had pressured the UK’s Serious Fraud Office to quash an investigation into alleged corruption in arms deals between Saudi Arabia and British firm BAE Systems, which the British High Court later ruled had been illegal).