Matthew Norman: What will history make of Blair's guest list?

Can you believe it was only a calendar month ago that we changed Prime Ministers? It feels like a year, at the very least, since the smooth and orderly transition. Aided by the various near-disasters and the mooted reversal of several high-profile policies he supported when they were enacted into law, Gordon Brown has already acquired the reassuringly stolid aura of longstanding helmsman.

At times, in fact, it feels as though Tony Blair's tenure never happened at all... that it was nothing more than a mass hypnotic trance, or a decade-long bad dream like the one in Dallas from which Bobby Ewing emerged in his shower.

Did we really tolerate all that nauseating Eurotrash nonsense for a decade? Well, yes, sad to say we did, as confirmed by the publication of the final tranche of Chequers dinner invitees, from April 2006 to his departure. And even by the standards of the previous lists (Esther Rantzen, forsooth), what a bewildering tranche it is.

One of the nicer things about being Prime Minister, you'd have thought, is the carte blanche it offers to surround yourself with the most intriguing people in the land. "Who would you ask to your dream dinner party?" is a staple of the celeb questionnaire, and some of us will have played the game at home. Forgive the impertinence of second guessing so diverse and sophisticated a readership, but I imagine that wish lists restricted to living British nationals might include one or two from a pool of James Lovelock, Helen Mirren, Eric Hobsbawm, Shami Chakrabarti, Lady Thatcher, Ricky Gervais, Tony Benn, Tom Stoppard, Lucian Freud, Peter Tatchell, Mary Warnock, Richard Dawkins and a few hundred others who, while we may or may not admire them and their work, could be relied on to enliven an evening.

Everyone will have their own preferences from across the spectrum of science, politics, law, charity, finance, religion, sport, soldiering, the arts and entertainment. But I do not believe there is another human being over the age of 30 in Britain today who, with the entire populace as potential dinner companions, would plump, as Tony Blair did, for Vernon Kay.

Mr Kay, for those fortunate to have evaded him, is the TV presenter widely regarded by experts as the most vapid, smug and irksome in even that medium's recent history. A young man from Bolton whose stewardship of Family Fortunes recasts Les Dennis as the lovechild of Dorothy Parker and Isaiah Berlin, he is presumably the inspiration for Little Britain's Des Kaye, a deranged former children's presenter now working in a hardware superstore. Although we mustn't be unduly cruel to the fundamentally harmless Mr Kay, whose wife and sometime co-presenter Tess Daly joined him at Chequers, it is simply not possible to watch his ceaselessly gurning features for 15 seconds without entertaining the thought "But where is your carer?"

It took months of pressure from the Lib Dems' Norman Lamb before No 10 disclosed this final roll call, and even then it refused to divulge the cost to the taxpayer: we know Mr Blair spent about a million quid flying to the Middle East and elsewhere to audition for his new job as peacemaker (could Gordon not invoice the Quartet for the full amount?), but not how much was lavished on Vernon Kay's supper.

Nor would Downing Street respect its tradition of listing dinner guests by date, so it remains unclear whether Vernon Kay dined on the same night as Rowan Williams, enabling him to enquire of the Archbishop what "our survey said" about free will, the nature of the Trinity and other vexing areas of theological debate; or whether he was there with the Times columnist David Aaronovitch, one of the newspaper world's very few surviving supporters of the invasion of Iraq.

Given Mr Aaronovitch's doughty defence of that misadventure, his presence at least makes some sense. So does that of Richard Madeley, whose Channel 4 show might one day be of use should a certain retired PM's memoirs be selected for its Book Club. Chris Evans is very rich and has many homes, albeit none so far as I know on Barbados, while as for the GMTV presenters Fiona Phillips and Lorraine Kelly, each has a column in a Saturday tabloid in which they dutifully eulogised Mr Blair until the end.

Yet while these invitations may be explicable, as are those of a few potential employers (the director of an events-organising company leaps off the page), would you actively choose to spend time with any of the above, other perhaps than Dr Williams?

Until reading this list, I thought my evening at the American Embassy (purely as a consort) constituted the ultimate dinner party nightmare. Two seats away, with only an RAF wife for buffer zone, sat Alan Sugar in the midst of one of his sporadic attempts to sue me for libel. The greeting lacked warmth, so I turned frantically to the jolly young woman on my right, explaining the situation and asking if I could cling to her for solace. "Is that your wife over there?" she said. Yes, I said, it was. "I see," she said. "Your wife sacked my mum."

Unimaginably excruciating though the ensuing three hours were, I would go through them again sitting on drawing pins and listening to Sir Cliff Richard perform his entire oeuvre of religious anthems rather than endure five minutes with Mr Blair's showbiz chums ... a cast of characters seemingly compiled by Dante the week TV Quick hired him to revisit his Inferno and locate that missing eighth circle of hell.

The shopping list theory of history holds that we can learn as much about a distant era from the most banal details as from military and political records and the weightiest academic discourse; that the customs, mores and prevailing atmosphere of an age are uniquely illuminated by trivia and gossip. Certainly this guest list is as richly revealing as any shopping list scratched on to papyrus in hieroglyphs or Linear B.

Despite Mr Blair's professed addiction to reading the Koran, not one Muslim scholar or community leader appears on the guest list (not a single Muslim name anywhere, in fact). Not one economist, climatologist, philosopher or historian to set against the wit and wisdom of England coach Steve McClaren, who when asked how he intended to reverse a five-game run without a goal, replied: "Keep going, keep going. Keep doing the same things."

That's precisely what Mr Blair did when faced with merciless ridicule after the publication of the previous Chequers guest lists, and you can almost admire the imperviousness to public contempt evident in the invitation to Vernon Kay. But the statistic that tells his story as well and succinctly as anything ever will, I think, is that during his final year as Prime Minister, he chose to dine with twice as many light entertainment television presenters, 10 in all, as fellow MPs.

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