It is the haste with which Tony Blair has scripted his own sequel as the world’s envoy to the Middle East that gives the impression of self-absorption. The rush by his team to try to announce some kind of role by today, the last day of his premiership, seems designed to ease the sting of surrendering high office more than to solve the problems of the Middle East.

It is not that the idea is ludicrous, if you take a long step around Blair’s role as one of the architects of the Iraq invasion, and his support of Israel’s military action in Lebanon. Many Arabs loathe him just for that, and in a region that sustains grudges so easily for hundreds of years, the grievances of the past decade are hardly going to be set aside. But Blair’s passion for tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beyond dispute.

Nor does his role upstage Gordon Brown as much as it might have seemed just a fortnight ago (although it would have been polite to tell the incoming team before last Wednesday, as diplomats say was the case). Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in the past two weeks has undermined Brown’s pragmatic and humane proposal to focus on the Palestinian economy even while the politics were stalled.

But the problem with any role for Blair is that it is impossible to define while the political route ahead remains so unclear, and that won’t be sorted out by a few hours of talks about what he is supposed to do. The speed with which Blair’s role has been written has left ambassadors and senior Foreign Office officials speechless in the past five days, gesturing with their canapés at garden parties to make up for an absence of words. The plan to make him an envoy for the Quartet — the US, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia — has been driven by the US and Blair’s office (the Foreign Office kept at arm’s length), with EU support. Finally, at the weekend, Russia gave startled assent.

Blair casts himself as EU president candidate

Speaking on French TV, Tony Blair sang the praises of the EU and sketched his agenda for its future, all in fluent French

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The role will be “political”, rather than economic, like the job done by Jim Wolfensohn, former head of the World Bank, who used his efforts (and his own money) to try to breathe life into the Palestinian economy. At least before Hamas’s seizure of Gaza, the pursuit of peace-through-prosperity was the thrust of Brown’s policy. He had dispatched Ed Balls, economic secretary to the Treasury, to the region, and Balls had concluded that economic recovery was “a prerequisite for bringing peace”.

In a recent speech to Labour Friends of Israel, the parlimentary lobbying group, Brown cited the report by the Portland Trust, set up by financier Sir Ronald Cohen, which argued that the development of the Northern Ireland economy had lessons for the Palestinians.

The attraction is that, even when diplomacy has disintegrated, a focus on the economy may still improve the situation. The Portland report is an excellent analysis of why that worked in Northern Ireland. But amid turmoil, it is impossible, and that may be the case on the West Bank and Gaza now.

The US-Israeli plan is now to pour resources into the West Bank, and to shore up Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, to make the contrast with Gaza as great as possible. But the hazards are huge. Abbas will not want to abandon the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza (nor to seem like a US-Israeli pawn). Any revival of the West Bank economy would depend on Israel relaxing control of Palestinian movement, as argued in a World Bank report last month that was highly critical of Israeli policy. Yet Israel can say that this would expose it to insupportable security threats; Hamas has a significant presence on the West Bank and it is not going away.

Blair may well feel that this paralysis plays to his strengths. The success of talks in Northern Ireland, arguably his greatest achievement, sprang from his skills as a broker. He has always been convinced, officials say, that if you lean over the table, in shirt sleeves, looking the other side in the eyes, you can extract a deal. No doubt that is how he imprinted this weekend’s EU deal so firmly with British concerns.

But that technique can make too light of the deep changes needed to make the deals work. In Northern Ireland, Blair’s regional devolution had paved the way. And no broker, however charismatic, will have the clout of a government head. In Blair’s rush to fashion a new persona, in one of the world’s most bitter conflicts, it is hard not to feel a personal urgency that is out of step with the crisis in the region.

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