Should Tony Blair return to lead the Labour Party?

I very much doubt it, a lot has changed in 20 years. And we shouldn't forget that PMQs are not the be-all and end-all. Hague frequently gave Blair the runaround but he was still thrashed at the ballot box

Blair, rather unfairly, is the most universally reviled public figure in the UK. He is hated on the left and on the right, and I can't see how he would be successful. He's a sort of bogey-man figure now, onto whom all bad is projected.

Charismatic speaker with an excellent electoral record or not, there's no way the public could get behind him. And can you imagine all the cringeworthy attempts at citizen arrests of Blair for war crimes? Hard to lead in such circumstances.

Having said that, Labour under the leadership of Blair the perceived antichrist would probably still be more electable than Labour with Diane Abbott as shadow home sec.

Well obviously. Some people forget how successful a leader Blair was and they forget things like the introduction of the minimum wage (not that I agree with that, necessarily, but it was very popular nonetheless), the mountains of money pumped into the NHS, how easy it was to get jobs and loads of other things. However many others do not forget this because they haven't got memories like goldfish. I've said before that the country wants to vote Labour back in so long as they had a plausible candidate who appealed to the centre.

People massively overstate the resentment of the Iraq War. There was resentment, yes, but people are acting like this was the main feature of Blair's government in the eyes of the people at the time. This is simply revisionist claptrap. Generally people look past foreign policy issues if the economy is doing well and people have secure jobs and money in their pockets, not the other way around. The only people who tend not to are students and the type of people who take their money for granted because they're always had it so they don't see the importance of job security to feed their families. That's why most Corbyn supporters are middle-class luvvies and why voters in the Labour heartlands can't stand the guy. For everyone else, the Blair years were characterised by a barnstorming job market. That's why most people won't touch Labour with a barge pole at the moment. Because they're veering away from what made them good and towards Trot Liverpool Council-style crap and an obsession over issues nobody except students care about.

Tony Blair hinted in an Esquire interview that he might be open to returning to frontline politics. I think it would be possible for him to win a leadership election due to the open-primary system that would allow hundreds of thousands of moderates to vote if they were given a candidate they could get behind (maybe Dan Jarvis, at some point?).

I really hope Blair does return, he was an excellent Prime Minister. He was not a perfect Prime Minister, no PM ever is, but he modernised this country. He fixed up the NHS which was in a state of collapse when he entered office; he did away with some of the more indefensible elements of the constitution like hereditary peers having guaranteed seats in the Lords, brought in the minimum wage, brought 600,000 children out of poverty and presided over 10 years of one of this country's greatest ever periods of growth and prosperity. He would be far better than the political pygmy Labour currently has in the leadership

Anyway, here's some footage from a 1996 PMQs with Blair kicking Major around the Commons chamber.

[video="youtube;tyeCSr-6YBI"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyeCSr-6YBI[/video]

well he is better then any of their candidates since. However I still dislike his politics a lot. i guess this is Labor they only ever get worse never better. I learned that when I found out that the guy running against Corbyn was even worse.

That is good ol Labor for you no matter how bad they get you know they will always be worse next time.

He also started the Iraq war and caused the death of thousands of working class lads in the army based on a lie concocted by his partner in crime Dubya, the greedy **** probably lined his own pockets with the oil money they stole from Saddam. Also, moral issues with Iraq aside, if we go with the idea that they genuinely did believe they had WMDs, why did they leave a power vacuum? They didn't even install a proper government for god's sake.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'd rather have Blair as PM than Corbyn.