After a period of welcome obscurity, Tony Blair is suddenly everywhere again, making peace in the Middle East, promoting his memoir, and now even getting himself involved in the pope’s state visit to Britain. This is the fault of the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which chose to publish on its front page an article by Blair about Cardinal John Henry Newman, whom the pope is to beatify in Birmingham on Sunday. There is no reason to think that Blair, a recent convert to Catholicism, is particularly knowledgeable about this most famous of all British converts, but his article is interesting all the same for what it says about its author.

I never cease to be amazed by the amount of futile research universities conduct, and the most recent example is that carried out by a team at Oxford University into people’s social networks. This has sought to establish how many friends the average person has and how many of these count as close friends.

I can’t imagine why this matters, but the answers revealed by Professor Robin Dunbar this week are that most people have around 150 friends of which only five belong to their inner circle – friends they see at least once a week and who will offer emotional support when needed. On that basis, I have no close friends at all, for living in the country I see nobody except the gardener “at least once a week”. But even those who do manage to do so are doomed to lose a couple of them if they have the misfortune to fall in love.

Blair may be on the defensive here because he has often been criticised by orthodox Catholics for supporting legal abortion and same-sex unions. So he cites Newman again as saying that there can never be an end to the development of church doctrine and that all doctrine must enjoy the consensus of the whole “body of the faithful” to be considered infallible. “I doubt if this voice is yet taken seriously enough on moral questions, or if we have yet fully digested the implications of these ideas,” Blair writes. “The tendency of some religious leaders to bundle a large number of different ideas into a bag marked ‘secularism’, then treat it as a sinister package, is divisive in pluralist societies.”

Not content with implying that Newman would not be opposed to a bit of compromise on sexual issues, Blair even suggests that the putative saint would be a supporter of his Faith Foundation and its support for development projects because it was Newman who had first “put the concept of development on the map” and without whom “we probably would not be using the terms ‘Millennium Development Goals’ or ‘international development’ today”.

The sale of unique gifts and novelty gifts is said to be worth tens of millions of pounds during the Pope’s first ever state visit to the UK.