“Sir Winston, this is a no-smoking building!"

I have been well trained by the P.C. police, and so my first reaction, upon receiving a visit from the legendary British war leader, was to tell him to put out his cigar.

"My dear boy," Winston Churchill said to me in his famously rumbly voice, "I was rarely far from a Cubano or a glass for my whole adult life. Yet, not only did I rally Western civilization to victory over Nazism, but I also lived to be 90."

"Good point," I remarked. "Say, do you have an extra one of those Havanas?"

He handed me a stogie.

"Now," he continued, having read my mind, "you were sitting around wondering what I think about Tony Blair as prime minister." I nodded eagerly.

"Three points," he announced, holding up three stubby fingers. "First, on the subject of Iraq, Blair was never ‘Bush’s poodle,’ as the London papers called him. The English spent 500 years colonizing the rest of the world -- bearing the white man’s burden, as Rudyard Kipling put it -- and that epoch of civilization didn’t just come to a screeching halt in the 1940s, even though a few Labor Party leaders, such as Clement Attlee, might have wished that it had.

"The English mission endures," he declared. "When you say to a true Englishman, ‘Did you hear the news from the Khyber Pass, or from the Straits of Molucca?’ he perks up, ready to take action, ready to play another round of ‘the great game.’ "

"You mean the worldwide struggle for geo-dominance?" I asked.

"Yes, the ancient and eternal tournament of statesmen." He paused for effect and then carried on:

"Second, because empire is still important, it must be done right. And here’s where I do have some criticism of Blair. One of the reasons I could be an effective war leader was that I had been a warrior myself in my younger days. After graduating from Sandhurst, I fought in three wars whilst still in my 20s. And then, in my 40s, I commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in France during the Great War. In other words, I understood military issues."

"So you didn’t just talk the talk, you walked the walk," I interjected.

The great man seemed puzzled at first by this American vernacular, but then smiled. "Yes, that’s a good way to put it. Nice, simple, one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words, just as I favored in my own speeches, such as ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ "

Churchill took a contented puff on his cigar, leaving me to remember that, in addition to everything else, he had won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Then, Sir Winston continued: "And so to my third point about Blair, which also applies to your own president. Namely: If you want to be successful, you have to be ready to try new things. Experiment! For example, in the Great War, I could see that infantry charges across no man’s land were not working -- ‘fighting machine guns with men’s chests,’ I called it -- and so I spearheaded the introduction of the armored tank.

"That’s what the Anglo-Americans needed in Iraq over these past four years: some new weapon, some new thrust. When I put down rebellious Iraqis back in ‘20, I was ready to use poison gas -- but they surrendered first."

I nodded, as Churchill continued: "Meanwhile, Tony, out of power, faces his own ‘wilderness years.’ But he’s only 54. That’s 11 years younger than I was when I first came to No. 10. And don’t forget, I finished my second stint as PM when I was 80."

"So don’t rule out a comeback?" I queried.

"Exactly. He just needs the proper chemical fortitude." Churchill dipped his nose into his brandy snifter. And then the great man was gone, whisked away to some other rendezvous with destiny in a cloud of alcohol and tobacco. I looked around, hoping the smoke detectors wouldn’t go off.