John Rentoul: Blair made me proud

You cannot stop him drafting his memoirs, can you? Each time, the draft becomes a little more vivid, a little more Thatcherite. "Britain is not a follower today," he said yesterday. "This is the greatest nation on earth."

He was at it in a newspaper article the other day, too. "I no longer agree," he wrote, "with the Blair of 1992." It was a typically engaging argument. He was talking about antisocial behaviour - then he thought it was the product of a general breakdown; now he thought it was a problem of a few dysfunctional families. But he has not really changed his mind. He was simply patronising David Cameron for adopting the same rhetoric in opposition that he once did.

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The remarkable fact about Blair is how little he has changed. I met the Blair of 1992 and was impressed enough to want to write a book about him. His ideas seemed right for the Labour Party and the country. The latent streak of Thatcherian vainglory was there too, well hidden and still unfocused. On balance, I thought he would make a good prime minister. On balance, I think he has been a good prime minister, and so do three-fifths of the voters, according to The Independent's poll last week. And yet those same voters profess themselves dissatisfied with almost everything about his record. Yesterday was an exception, because any look back over the past decade cannot avoid a sense of perspective. But the tone is that of: "What have the Romans ever done for us?"

We had one of those "Romans" moments last month when Frank Luntz, the American pollster who convenes focus groups for Newsnight, gathered a group of former Labour voters in a studio to discuss 10 years of suffering under the Blair police state. Except that Luntz then asked them whether Blair had done anything good as Prime Minister. There was a pause. "Well," one man said grudgingly, "there is Northern Ireland." Someone else chipped in about civil partnerships for gay people. Suddenly there was a danger that the glass might be not merely half-full but brimming over.

So if Blair has not changed, why have perceptions of him changed so much? Never has a politician suffered so much from the gap between facts and perceptions. People look back and think that they voted with high hopes. The complaint today is that Blair promised so much and yet delivered so little. It takes quite an effort of historical re-imagining to remember how little Blair promised. Those five pledges on the 1997 card, so self-effacing no one could remember them. Yet, after the landslide, people thought that Blair had been given special authority to do whatever it was they cared about most. They were bound to be disappointed - the only surprise was that it took so long.

So he was, in September 1997, the most popular Prime Minister ever for having done nothing at all - apart from making the Bank of England independent. And now, with a record that should, if judged objectively, mark him out as the finest prime minister in living memory outside times of total war, he is reviled for spin, lies and worse and driven from office. Spin? His government couldn't spin its way out of a wet paper bag. Blair has a record of achievement that stands comparison with Attlee and Thatcher. Old Labour prefers Attlee, what used to be the new right prefers Thatcher. The point is that Attlee squandered his mandate in five years, and that Thatcher left a legacy of social division.

Yet Blair's record is conceded so grudgingly as to suggest that none of it was worth it and we might as well have broken up the NHS and let state schools go to ruin. Blair has been too discounted by popular cynicism to be able to make the case for himself, reduced yesterday to: "It's your call."The most unworthy accusation is that he is more dishonest than most politicians. Despite the attempts of opponents of the Iraq war to pin a copper-bottomed fib on Blair, the worst that can be said by someone who cares about words was Lord Butler's description of him as "disingenuous". That does not mean Blair lied. It means (according to Chambers) "not entirely sincere or open". The difference between a lie and an assertion that turns out to be unfounded ought to be an important one, but many people who should have known better contributed to the coarsening of political discourse.

But because the occupation of Iraq has gone so badly, Blair cannot shake off the unfair association which denies him the credit for the better, fairer country Britain now is. And it is a fairer country. Not just in the testing sense of one that grants rights to minorities that are unpopular with majorities. The Human Rights Act has been a success precisely because it is so unpopular, and has proved so awkward to Blair himself. And as for his record on gay rights, it is as significant as that of Roy Jenkins in the 1960s. Instead of that, we have two irreconcilable perceptions. One, among the elite, that Blair has trampled on our civil liberties. The other, among the masses, that he has been too soft on crime.

On the first, I was struck by the ferocity with which Lord Carlile, the independent reviewer of anti-terrorist law, recently rejected the suggestion that Britain was a "police state" as "the vilest defamation". If Britain really were a police state, Lord Carlile wrote in The Independent on Sunday, "how many control orders would one expect? Certainly 1,800, perhaps 18,000. Here we have but 18 at present and at no time to date more than 21".

Britain is also a fairer society in the important sense that the great Thatcher Inequality Drive has been halted. The official figures on personal wealth show that it is more equally distributed than when Blair came to power. Yet this week's New Statesman concluded its "reckoning" of the Blair era thus: "The main weakness of the new Labour project was most vividly illustrated in the area of inequality." If that is the "main" issue, it must be even more shaming that the New Statesman is unaware of the facts.

His efforts to write the first draft of his memoirs and therefore of history are mainly unavailing: everything we know about him is wrong. He is useless at spinning. He is not a liar. He has been an outstanding prime minister. The perceptions are different, but the facts are clear.

John Rentoul is a biographer of Tony Blair and chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday

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