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7 August 2015

This is what happens when you mash up Tony Blair with Doctor Who

Blairites conquer and destroy, Blairites conquer and destroy.

By Jonn Elledge

A few weeks ago, for reasons that now escape me, I decided to become a Blairite.

I don’t mean that I decided to join the Labour party so that I could move it slightly to the right of William Hague, or to make it my mission to invade a medium-sized Middle Eastern country. No, I would be a literal Blairite. I would start telling people that I wanted Tony Blair to become Prime Minister again.

My thinking was that the current Labour front bench is a pretty limp bunch, Blair won election after election, and politicians in times gone by used to return to high office time and again after being kicked out of power.

William Gladstone was prime minister on four different occasions. When he left office for the last time, in 1894, he was 84 years old. Tony Blair is only 62. Join the dots, guys.

I wasn’t being entirely serious about this. It was of a piece with the time they dug Richard III out of that car park and I decided my Twitter persona would become a fanatical Yorkist for the week. On a different occasion, I used to claim that Stannis Baratheon was the rightful king of Westeros. Not sure why. It passes the time.

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Anyway, in the midst of this low level emotional breakdown, I produced this:

For those who don’t know their geek lore, that’s a quote from the first Doctor Who, played by William Hartnell. It comes from a 1964 episode, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, in which the Doctor addressed those words to his granddaughter Susan on the occasion of his abandoning her in a post-apocalyptic wasteland against her will.

Between one thing and another, it seemed like the right quote to attach to an image suggesting that Tony Blair will one day come back and save us all.

The halo is a nice touch, I think.

Anyway, once I’d done that, it seemed a shame for it to be the only Blair/Who mash up on the internet, so I came up with this one. This time the quote is spoken by Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor, in 2010’s The Pandorica Opens.

Appropriately enough, though he doesn’t know it yet, when the Doctor says this he’s walking into a massive great trap.

The main reaction to this mixture of two different types of off-putting nerdiness came from half a dozen wits, each of whom thought they were being original when they said it would be more appropriate to use quotes originally spoken by Daleks.

Daleks aren’t massively expressive, though, so instead I attached a Tony Blair quote to a picture of their creator, Davros:

Chilling, isn’t it.

Last, and also least, I decided to strip the whole thing back to basics, and I came up with this.

At that point I remembered that I had a job and that this wasn’t it.

Join us next week at this time, when we’ll be trolling the entirety of Scotland by running a series of pictures of Alex Salmond with quotes from the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica pasted over the top of them.

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