Who would take investment advice from Tony Blair?

Of Tony Blair's new plum job at J.P. Morgan, Peter Hitchens writes:

"Now, as Mr Blair gets his reward for nothing, there's the usual rubbish about 'experience and contacts', but I'd be amazed if he can tell J.P. Morgan anything it doesn't know, or open any doors it cannot already open."

That Blair has nothing to tell them about the world is surely right. I think more of Blair than some conservatives, but his speeches and interviews continually showed the man's ignorance of economics, his indifference to history and his philosophical vacuousness - William Hague once joked that if Blair earned a peerage he should be Baron of Ideas.

Insofar as Blair talked about his understanding of the world, he showed only a propensity towards believing all the fashionable cant that reached his ears. J.P. Morgan need only recall the "Third Way" (with or without cringing) to realise the sort of nonsense the man was capable of falling for - or manufacturing. Blair's enthusiasm for democratising Iraq and for pacifying the Balkans and now Palestine is far more laudable, but one suspects some historical perspective would have tamed his way of implying that these things would be easy. Accounts of the Blairs' fondness for New Age mysticism - feng shui and primal screams included - seem entirely plausible.

With a record like this, Tony Blair is exactly the sort of creduluous, undiscriminating, hype-believing person one would have thought investment banks don't need any more of. Had he had been advising J.P. Morgan for the last decade, one can easily imagine him being gung-ho for the Euro as the solution to all the continent's economic problems and sure Britain would stagnate outside it, evangelising for the 'new economy' and every profitless dotcom right up to their share prices falling off the cliff, and throwing all caution to the wind in talking up sub-prime mortgages and the housing market while price to average income ratios rocketed to unsustainable levels.

Perhaps J.P. Morgan is planning to use Blair solely for the extensive contacts a decade in Downing Street will have allowed him to develop. But if they're going to pay the slightest heed to his advice, I wouldn't want them managing my money!