It’s usually a question one associates with Tony Blair after visiting the Iraq Body Count website, but I ask it this time in a literal rather than philosophical sense. After seeing the number of committees for which Blair has just assumed personal responsibility, you have to ask: How does he sleep? Where’s the time?

He is now the chair of the Ministerial Committees on (deep breath) Anti-Social Behaviour, Asylum and Migration, Defence and Overseas Policy (and its sub-committees on International Terrorism and Iraq), Energy and the Environment, European Union Strategy, National Health Service Reform, Public Services Reform, Regulation, Bureaucracy and Risk (and its sub-committee on Regulatory Accountability), Schools Policy, Serious and Organised Crime and Drugs and Welfare Reform.

Tony’s clearly more of an enormobrain than he’s given credit for. Well hidden for so long, it appears he has the polymath’s thoughtfruit to shame Umberto Eco. Not bad for a man with a bad back, dodgy ticker and, what Lord Jenkins memorably described as, a “second class mind”. And he’s still got his epic, criss-crossing tour of the G8 countries - begging their leaders to help him salvage something from his car crash premiership - to do. How does he do it? Is he like prolific Brit comic writer Warren Ellis who, when asked how he maintained his work rate replied, “time management and cloning”?

It looks to all the world that instead of carrying on as before (which some of us said, just after the election, was bloody outrageous), Blair is now tightening his grip even further. Sweating on what is shaping up to be a rather threadbare legacy, it’s time to roll up his sleeves and ensure practically every major initiative has his fingerprints on it. Expect more and more policy to be handed down from on high. Not that much dribbles out from anywhere else anymore. (Insert your own “culture of respect” and “listened and learned” joke here - I’ve repeated myself so often I’m starting to sound like a cabinet minister stuck in a revolving door.)

All this from a prime minister who made the astonishing statement at Prime Minister’s Questions last week that the UK doesn’t need a written constitution to better hold its elected leaders to account but merely that…

…the answer, if there is an easy answer, is to be found in the way in which Parliament is reported and, in particular, in ensuring that when people are speaking in Parliament — not simply at Prime Minister’s questions but in the many debates that take place in a somewhat less crowded House — sufficient attention is paid.

Now, regardless of where you stand on the issue of a written constitution (if you even have a standpoint), surely you would agree that - on the thinness of Blair’s new mandate from the electorate - this is either breathtaking idiocy or yet more brass-necked cynicism. Of course more people paying attention to how our laws are made would be healthy for democracy, but only a fool with the intellectual hinterland of a Celebrity Love Island contestant would argue that that attention could act as a brake on the kind of constitutional excesses we’ve seen from the New Labour high command since 1997. It’s amazing he was able to say it with a straight face.

Here you have a prime minister, widely lambasted for his “kitchen cabinet”, “sofa style” of government and endless control-freakery, suggesting that any (perceived he says, real says just about everybody else) imbalance between the Executive (Blair and entourage) and the Legislature (Parliament) could be addressed if only more of us would watch BBC Parliament. He’s a man by his own admission looking for the “easy answer” to constitutional reform. He wants “sufficient attention… paid” to Parliament and then people will see that Blair really is held to account by Parliament. Just when you thought his power to stagger was waning.

He said “the need to ensure that Parliament holds the Executive to account is absolutely right”. To which I would say, pace the criticisms in the Butler Report, Iraq, tuition fees and innumerable other policies cooked up over coffee in his den between him and unelected wonks, bloody let it then.

Writing in the Independent last week, bouffanted privateer Alan Milburn (of all people) said: “The political world and the real world are propelled into different orbits.”

Bang on, Alan. Bang on.