LAST WEEK, the headline in a New York Times article, “The return of Tony Blair,” drew attention to the least welcome comeback since Freddie Kruger.

The US newspaper had noticed the increasingly public embrace Keir Starmer is offering his predecessor, and Blair’s obvious willingness to take advantage of his restoration in Labour’s favours to advance his agenda.

The advantage for Starmer is that, as the report notes, Blair “has charisma and communication skills that Starmer lacks.”

Indeed, when Blair was Labour’s leader in opposition before the 1997 election, his personal polling helped turbocharge his party’s, while Starmer is a drag on Labour’s prospects.

It is also a fact, unpalatable as it is to any progressive, that by the likely time of the next general election, it will be 50 years before anyone other than Blair has beaten the Tories. The leader who came nearest to breaking that run was Jeremy Corbyn in 2017.

Further, it is no secret that Blair’s acolytes have long since taken control of Starmer’s operation and are setting out the parameters — very narrow ones, be it said — within which another Labour government will operate.

Hence, Rachel Reeves has adapted economic policy to the requirements of the City. Public ownership is out, punitive Tory social policies will remain in place, and foreign policy will not even be given the vaporous “ethical dimension” which pre-1997 Blair offered.

Lord Peter Mandelson, who has a better claim to be the founder of Blairism than anyone, has warned Starmer against two things — focusing on green issues and trying to scrap the House of Lords.

Why a peer who made a fortune advising energy oligarchs should make those two demands is not a mystery to tax Sherlock Holmes. But, lo and behold, Starmer has indeed rowed back on his Green New Deal and hardly a word is now heard of Gordon Brown’s Lords reform plans.

All this was preliminary to Starmer and Blair sharing a stage together last month, hosted by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a body which advises autocratic regimes around the world and thus a natural fit for Starmer’s Labour.

Nevertheless, this bromance is risky for Starmer. The New York Times highlighted the problem in the first paragraph of its article: “One issue still defines the former British prime minister ... his disastrous decision to join the US-led invasion of Iraq.”

Indeed, the country has scarcely forgotten that it was taken into that criminal enterprise in defiance of public opinion and mass opposition by Blair. If one word defines Blair’s place in history it is “Iraq.”

He launched the aggression on the basis of lies. Someone already known as a serial fibber is taking a risk sitting next to a predecessor remembered only for falsehoods.

Opposition to illegal wars was one of the 10 pledges Starmer offered the party during his fraudulent leadership campaign. If it is one of the very few he has not yet reversed, that is likely due to want of opportunity.

Starmer is gambling that enough time has passed for the matter of a few hundred thousand deaths and the sweeping aside of international law, not to mention the step-parenting of Isis, to be held of little account.

That is surely not the case. Starmer’s bellicosity over Ukraine is bad enough, but any hint that he would emulate Blair by following a dim-witted US president into further aggressions would be poison at the polls.

Blair was a sinister snake-oil salesman. Starmer has been rumbled as a mendacious mediocrity. As any mathematician could advise, the addition of two negatives does not generate a positive.