In November 2016, shortly after Donald Trump’s election victory, I met Tony Blair early one morning at his London office. He had exclusive news to share. He was “changing everything”, he told me – shutting down his commercial ventures to launch a non-profit: a new, technology-driven policy and advisory platform called The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI).

“The thing that’s really tragic about politics today is that the best ideas about politics aren’t in politics,” he said. “I find the ideas are much more interesting in the technology sector, much more interesting ideas about how you change the world.”

Blair was no longer prime minister and had stepped down in 2015 as the Middle East envoy to the Quartet (representing the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, Russia). Yet he still wanted to change the world. He had become an evangelist for Silicon Valley innovation and for the transformative power of technology. Since 2021, Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, has donated or given at least $375 million to the TBI, which has annual revenues of $161 million.

“There are no second acts in American lives,” the novelist F Scott Fitzgerlad wrote as he declined into alcoholism and despair. Blair did not accept such fatalism. The vote for Brexit and Trump’s victory had energised him. He was “dismayed by the state of Western politics but incredibly motivated”. His dismay was powering his motivation. His second act in public life had begun.

At that point, Blair had not yet met Trump. But he had recently spoken to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner - then serving on the Trump transition team – after a chance encounter at Cipriani, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. Blair joined Kushner’s table, and they established a rapport. Their interests aligned, particularly on the Middle East, where the TBI is now deeply embedded, especially in the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states.

In 2015, Blair facilitated a key introduction between Benjamin Netanyahu and a senior UAE cabinet minister in London. This led to talks between Netanyahu and Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ), the ruler of the UAE.

Blair attended the White House signing of the Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain, in 2020. He returned in August, joining Kushner to present the 20-point Gaza peace plan to Trump in the Oval Office. Among the proposals is the creation of a so-called Board of Peace to oversee post-war Gaza, an initiative Blair reportedly hopes to lead or at least join. “I like Tony,” Trump said at the Gaza peace summit in the Red Sea resort Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt on Tuesday, “but I want to find out if he’s an acceptable choice.”

What does Blair want in Gaza? Unlike Trump, he does not view peace in the strip as inevitable, as a “done deal”, characterising the situation as being at the “day before” stage rather than the “day after”. And is he an acceptable choice to act as peacemaker and interim governor?

He may be close to Gulf oligarchs but among the masses on the Arab street Blair remains unforgiven for his role in prosecuting the Iraq war and for the blood-drenched anarchy that followed the end of the brutal tyranny of Saddam Hussain and the collapse of Ba’athist state. And in his role as the Quad’s envoy, Blair was considered as having a pro-Israel bias.

Blair is undeterred. Largely unnoticed, his Middle East team has been carrying out face-to-face polls across the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. In Gaza, less than 4 per cent of Palestinians want to live under Hamas rule, according to the latest poll. Blair has cited this data to argue that change from within Gaza is possible. Trump, Kushner and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the region, were listening. They are ruthless mercantilists. For them, stability in the Middle East offers boundless opportunities to make even more money.

One way to understand Blair and his engagement in the Israel-Hamas conflict is to see him as a Machiavellian prince (or leader), as Jonathan Powell, his former chief of staff, does. In 2011 Powell, now Keir Starmer’s national security adviser and currently embroiled in the China spying trial embroglio, published The New Machiavelli, an insider account of his time in Downing Street. The book is more than a memoir; it is a “handbook” and guide to the politics of power, drawing inspiration from Machiaevelli’s The Prince and The Discourses.

Powell, who remains close to Blair, is fascinated by how power is acquired and used. “Machiavelli’s morality of tough choices still applies in politics,” he wrote. “Public morality is different from private morality” because “leaders are repeatedly faced with the choice between the lesser of two evils”. On the eve of the general election last year, Powell said to me: “The truth is Britain has become largely irrelevant around the world since Brexit. What matters in politics is influence.”

When I interviewed Blair about the launch of the TBI, he refused to criticise Trump. And since then, he never has. “There are no clips of him criticising Trump or indeed Xi Jinping or Narendra Modi,” one source says. “He always says: ‘Don’t make enemies; you make enough of them by accident.’”

Blair has been frustrated by Starmer’s leadership. In 2021, after Labour lost the Hartlepool by-election, I published an essay by Blair in the New Statesman calling for Labour’s “total deconstruction and reconstruction”. Nothing less, he argued, would do. “Keir seems sensible but not radical. He lacks a compelling economic message. And the cultural message, because he is not clarifying it, is being defined by the ‘woke’ left, whose every statement gets cut-through courtesy of the right.”

Starmer was wounded by Blair’s intervention, but their relationship gradually improved. Still, they remain distant – divided as much by temperament as by ideology. Blair, nearly a decade older, seems more attuned to the forces of money, great power and oligarchy now remaking the world as the liberal rules-based order fragments. In recent months, he and Starmer have had no contact.

Blair will go his own way. The TBI will continue to operate as both a shadow foreign office and shadow policy unit, seeking influence wherever it can. Blair agrees with his longtime ally Powell – and indeed with Machiavelli – that politics is not governed by the moral codes of everyday life but is a contest for power, especially in the age of Trump.

That power was on full display in Sharm al-Sheik and Blair relished his place among world leaders: a prince in the twilight of his career hustling for influence in the court of King Donald.