Leading article: Lofty ambition, harsh reality and a catastrophic mistake

Friday, 11 May 2007

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Most modern British prime ministers have chosen, or more often, had forced upon them the brutally precipitate farewell. The snap decision, the lost vote, defeat at a general election, and the removal van at the door - that is how our political system works. Tony Blair has bucked that tradition, replacing it with perhaps the most protracted prime ministerial departure ever. Yesterday, at Trimdon in his Sedgefield constituency, he was feted like the second-rate rock star he might have been, bidding a strangely subdued and self-absorbed farewell.

Yet it was of a piece with the prevailing public mood. The exhilaration that had accompanied his rise was long gone, replaced by a mixture of realism and disenchantment. As Mr Blair said yesterday, expectations when he came to office were high, perhaps too high. But those expectations were real. From the youthful, risk-taking politician, who seized the opportunity of the Labour leadership and then slew the dragon of Clause IV, to the grinning prime minister-elect who saw the sun rise on New Labour's historic victory, Tony Blair was a new leader for a new millennium. It could, and for a while it did, only get better.

He set records and broke fresh ground. He was the youngest 20th-century prime minister. He was the first Labour prime minister to lead his party to three successive election victories. He was even the first prime minister for 150 years to become a father while in Downing Street. A consummate campaigner, with great personal charm and flair, perhaps his biggest gift to his party was the ability to outfox his opponents and to win elections.

But there is more to politics than electoral success. And in many ways he can claim to have modernised not only the Labour Party but the country. Britain today is a more confident nation, with a strong economy and a capital city in the vanguard of globalisation. As prime minister, Mr Blair was responsible for a succession of socially liberal provisions that recognised the fact of social change, but also demonstrated - by their acceptance - that Britain was a more liberal country than many had given it credit for. Benefits were directed towards children; unconventional families were as valid as the traditional model. The minimum wage was successfully introduced, civil partnerships recognised.

Elsewhere in domestic policy, his record is more ambiguous. As an institutional reformer, Mr Blair was ambitious, but not far-sighted. Devolution for Scotland and Wales has been embraced with more enthusiasm as time has gone on. But it has done little to calm nationalist sentiment, while having unpredicted implications for England and the Union. Reforms of the House of Lords and the judiciary were inconsistent and ill thought-through.

Some of the same defects dogged efforts to reform the public services, which were all too often piecemeal, profligate and fraught with unintended consequences. With education, as with the NHS, the results have failed to reflect the cost, and for all the talk of reform, there has been too little, too late. Our transport system remains as congested and haphazard as ever. And increasingly, on issues such as crime, security and immigration, an ugly authoritarianism has been on display.

From the earliest days there were hints of the three elements that would corrode the Blair prime ministership. The allure of money and celebrity that shone through the Bernie Ecclestone affair and would find its apotheosis in the "loans for peerages" scandal. The media-management that bordered at times on lying and fuelled mounting distrust in government. And the fractious relationship with Gordon Brown that prevented the more productive pursuit of a common purpose.

Abroad, as at home, realisation fell short of lofty ambition. Increased foreign aid and the focus on Africa were laudable, but remain incomplete. The early emphasis on Europe faded all too soon. Bold words on global warming proved to be little more than hot air, with carbon emissions rising and a refusal to set binding annual targets. And the pursuit of liberal interventionism in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Afghanistan - born, perhaps, of a sense that the West had failed Rwanda - led directly to Mr Blair's greatest mistake: the hubristic war in Iraq.

Iraq - what led up to it and what has proceeded from it - sums up so much that went wrong in other areas. An overestimate of what military or state intervention can do, a deluded sense of personal destiny, an inadequate understanding of history, an over-reliance on spin and a stubborn aversion to admitting fault. Above all, Iraq constituted a catastrophic failure of judgement. At the political level, it separated us needlessly from many European allies. At the popular level, it led to a souring of relations with the United States. It deflected attention from Afghanistan, the proven cradle of Islamic terrorism, while poisoning relations with much of the Islamic world. So far, it has cost the lives of almost 150 British service personnel and thousands of Iraqis.

The malign effects of Iraq, however, reach still further. The dossiers that made the case for Iraq being a global threat, and Mr Blair's retrospective attempts to shift the rationale for the war, like the narrowly drawn inquiries he instituted, all reinforced the impression of politics distorted by media manipulation. Public scepticism and cynicism were already well entrenched; with Iraq, the breakdown of trust between people and prime minister became terminal. This is his legacy.

Tony Blair leaves Britain a different country. It is more tolerant, more socially and ethnically mixed, and more open in every respect than it was 10 years ago. It is also more unequal and, regrettably, less socially mobile than it was. How far Mr Blair is responsible for any of this, and how far it merely reflects changing times, can be debated. What cannot be debated is Mr Blair's culpability for the greatest foreign policy mistake of the post-war period. Its repercussions will be felt for many years to come. It is the tragic epitaph for Tony Blair's decade as Prime Minister.