Blair has fallen out of favour across Europe

The collapse in British infrastructure is a reminder that Blairism was built on Thatcherism

By the end of next month, Tony Blair may be the only left-of-centre leader of a large European country. In the undeclared, five-year-old struggle to be the very model of a modern, European leader of the Left, the Prime Minister has already seen off Lionel Jospin. If the Right wins the German elections in September, he will have shaken off Gerhard Schröder's unpersuasive challenge to Blairism as the bright, new future for social democracy in Europe. And yet Mr Blair's reputation in Europe – and interest in Blairism as an exportable model – has never been at a lower ebb. The French media showed surprisingly little interest in his private, holiday-interrupting meeting yesterday with the new centre-right Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin.

This can be explained in various ways. Unlike his predecessor, Lionel Jospin, Mr Raffarin is not his own man. After an uncomfortable detour through left-right power sharing, French politics has bumped back on to its Gaullist tracks, with an all-powerful President and a subsidiary Prime Minister from the same political family. Mr Raffarin is the lieutenant – some would say office boy – of President Chirac. He has little control over foreign or European policy.

The meeting was, therefore, intrinsically of less interest than the annual, summer chats between the young, "modernising" British socialist, Mr Blair, and the old, "traditional", French socialist, Mr Jospin. In truth, the differences between the two were sometimes exaggerated. Mr Jospin was more pragmatic than ideological and Mr Blair more interventionist than the French media liked to admit.

The two men did not get on terribly well. And yet their two governments, for the most part, got on extremely well, probably better than any British and French governments since 1940. Despite the mad cow crisis and despite Sangatte and despite foot-and-mouth disease, day to day contacts between the governments were good.

How the Blair and Chirac-Raffarin teams will get on remains to be seen. The French Right – both politicians and the media – loved Blairism when they were in opposition. Lionising New Labour was a way of mocking Old Jospinism. The centre-right government now in power will find Blairism less attractive as it discovers that on a range of European issues – from industry and trade policy to agriculture – it is further to the interventionist Left than the Labour government over the Channel.

But this is not the only reason for the decline in the stock of Mr Blair in France – a pattern that can be traced across Europe.

The Prime Minister promised to put Britain at the centre of the European Union. He made a good start by scrapping the old Conservative, ideological opposition to a stronger European defence policy. Although only a small step, this was a clear signal that Blairist Britain believed that it could, and should, no longer rely entirely on a post-Cold War America to defend British interests in foreign and security policy.

The failure to join the euro, or give a clear signal on when Britain might join the euro, has been damaging but not critically damaging. European governments accept that British public and press opinion makes this a potentially career-destroying decision for Mr Blair. They would prefer that he waits and wins a referendum, rather than rushes and loses one, which would keep Britain out of the euro for a decade.

Interest in Blairism as a phenomenon has also been somewhat undermined by the simple truth that, despite the hype, the British economy has not significantly out-performed that of other EU countries in the past five years. The signs of collapse in British infrastructure, from railways to hospitals, is a reminder that Blairism was built on the foundations of Thatcherism: not a route than any EU country, despite the turn to the right in France, Italy and Spain, is inclined to follow.

But the real damage to the Prime Minister's reputation in Europe – his reputation as a different kind of British politician, capable of taking European decisions in Britain's long-term interests – began on 11 September last year.

Britain's wholehearted support for the US was not the issue. All European countries had the same, sincere reaction of sympathy and solidarity to the attacks on New York and Washington (yes, even France, despite the anti-French rubbish to be found in the right-wing US media).

European governments have been astonished and displeased, however, by the messianic tone of Mr Blair's support for President Bush's "war on terror" and the implication that anything less slavish and fulsome is a betrayal.

The French have always pursued an independent approach to US foreign policy. They were the first to jump ship on implacable, US-British hostility to Iraq. But they are not the only EU government to find it bizarre that the British Prime Minister should have sprinted ahead of British political and public opinion – and even US political and public opinion – in his support for a full-scale war against Saddam Hussein.

"Mr Blair's attitude is not simply 'we stand by America'. We all go along with that," one senior French official said. "His attitude seems to be 'we should stand by America, right or wrong'. With that, we cannot go along."

indyparis@compuserve.com