Mr Blair, moreover, shares many of the principles that the Tories presumably want the new figurehead to project: he is a free-marketeer, an Atlanticist and an opponent of a European superstate.
True federalists actually saw the Treaty of Rome as a move away from the building of a European superstate that they had hoped would develop from the European Coal and Steel Community, set up in 1951.
It was the city of London, in the year 1984. A city quite unlike the London we know today, shrouded in the dull, oppressive air of the totalitarian superstate of Oceania.