Tony Blair was the Great Gatsby of our time These parallels make it all the more timely that a new film adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece of a novel, The Great Gatsby, should be released this year, directed by Baz Luhrmann. If you're looking for an illustration of the depravity which infused the upper echelons of 1920s society, you're in luck. Leonardo DiCaprio will play Jay Gatsby, and Carey Mulligan his heart's desire, Daisy Buchanan. If Luhrmann remains true to the book, the film should contain a warning, albeit one that comes too late. The roaring twenties, like the nineties and early noughties, was a time of high confidence, low unemployment, general prosperity, enormous speculative bubbles and populations in thrall to unfettered materialism. But on both occasions society remained blissfully unaware of - or refused to see - the giant economic cock-up lurking just around the corner. The stock market crash of Black Tuesday - 29 October, 1929 - and the ensuing Great Depression brought about high unemployment, falling wages, bank runs, bank closures, bankruptcy, repossessions and the withdrawal of credit. Confidence bottomed out and society paid a high price. Sound familiar? We've been living in a world like Gatsby's West Egg for the last decade or so, and although the party stopped a while back, the hangover is intensifying. We've swapped flapper girls for slapper girls, and mint juleps for mojitos, but the principles, and fall-out, remain the same. Luhrmann has DiCaprio for his Gatsby. But in the real-life adaptation we've been living through, who was ours? Who was dizzied by wealth and a consuming desire to fulfil his self-ordained destiny? One man stands out: Tony Blair. We thought the sun was shining and so we made hay, but the light came from a star far brighter than the sun. It came from Tony Blair. We have all been guests at Tony's party. Like Gatsby, he idolised the rich, and thought he could spend his way into our hearts and minds. Like Gatsby, it worked for a short while. And then the facade - and the economy - collapsed. Then as now, the markets bounced back a few times before freefalling. But how many bounces does this dead cat have in it? As we teeter on the edge of another Great Depression, we can only hope that Cameron can fill FDR-sized shoes and devise a new New Deal, before we are all foraging for our food and wishing we'd paid more attention to that nice Bear Grylls. We would do well to remember how Fitzgerald ends the book: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And then one fine morning - So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Will we ever learn from the past? Or are we doomed to repeat it, getting elegantly wasted and being consumed with consumption at the expense of future generations?