Blair is last EU leader standing who thinks Iraq was a good idea.
With the election of Romano Prodi and the defeat of Berlusconi, Tony Blair now stands isolated as the last remaining EU leader defending the decision to invade Iraq.
When Aznar was defeated in Spain, there were only Blair and Berlusconi left singing off the same hymn sheet. With Prodi expected to call for the removal of Italian troops from the region, Blair will be left singing solo.
It cannot help but make him look more like a leader from another age and further precipitate his eventual political decline.
As someone who has canvassed twice for his election and who regularly donates money to his party, his decline is a sad one. It needn't have been this way.
Blair has been a good Labour leader in as many ways as he has been a bad one. Wealth has been redistributed under Blair, the poor are getting richer and the rich are getting poorer, although the last thing you'll ever hear is Blair talking about it. Socialism is almost an anathema to the man.
There has been welcome reinvestment in education and healthcare, with the improvement of the latter being noticeable anywhere you drive in the capital.
And yet to vote for him at the last election I had to put a clothes peg on my nose and make my cross on the sheet with the piece of paper held as far away from me as I could possibly get it. I actually felt soiled as I left the booth. Dirty. The way people feel when they leave a corner shop with a porn mag in a brown paper bag. I felt as if I had publicly confessed to some dreadful weakness of character.
It had all started so differently.
I remember the beautiful May morning on which Blair was elected. I was lunching in west Kensington, a rather fashionable and expensive part of London, at a restaurant that I had eaten in many times previously. Myself and the manager, who I knew well, had never in our lives discussed politics together. And yet, that morning, as I stepped inside he looked at me, smiled, and held his arms open wide. And we both said the same phrase that Labour posters had been blasting all over London for weeks, "It's a beautiful new dawn".
That was how strong the feelings in London were that morning. It was euphoric.
Eighteen years of living in the shadows of the Tory party were over.
How did we ever get from there to here? The question is, of course, rhetorical. We all know how we got to here. Iraq.
They'll write it on his tombstone.
Long forgotten will be any social advances he may have promoted. Long forgotten the miracles the Labour party produced economically to make the United Kingdom the fourth largest economy in the world.
All forgotten. All irrelevant, next to the catastrophe playing itself out in the Middle East.
For Iraq left not only a stain on his political reputation, it fundamentally changed the man. And the curious thing is, I can almost point to the date when he changed.
One of the things that I had always admired about Tony Blair was they way he struggled to do the right thing. There was an essential decency to the man.
There were times when, even though I didn't agree with the decisions he had taken, it was hard not to like someone who so obviously wrestled with his conscience. It was, literally, written all over his face.
And at no time did his anguish show on his face more obviously than in the days when the UK and US were attempting to obtain the famous second resolution that would allow the use of military force to uphold Res 1441.
Blair had persuaded Bush to go the route of the UN against Cheney's opposition with the proviso that, even if the second resolution was not forthcoming, Blair would join Bush in military action. An action that Blair, as a lawyer, surely knew in his heart was illegal without UN Security Council backing.
I suppose Blair felt rather confident that he would bring the French and German leaders to his cause, after all we were talking about a known madman in Saddam and, more to the point, Blair's powers of persuasion and his use of rhetoric are second to none.
But the plan had one fatal flaw. Blair was flat out wrong.
In the following few weeks the transformation in Blair was hideous to behold. His face went grey. He aged ten years in as many weeks. I actually started to worry for his health. As he realised what he had committed himself to, and began to understand that the French and German leaders were not going to back down, he became ashen.
It was the obvious reaction of a man who cared deeply that he do the right thing. And when the second resolution failed, it was as if he surrendered his future legacy to the judgement of history, and committed the country to war.
The colour returned to his cheeks and I have never again, from that day to this, seen any doubt in the man's face again. Where once there was doubt was, we now found a certainty of purpose that would have made Thatcher balk.
As the occupation descended into chaos Blair resorted to relying on a series of ever more bizarre strands of logic in order to defend the indefensible. He was almost acrobatic as he leapt through hoops of hypocrisy in his attempts to convince us that black was, indeed, white. If logistical gymnastics were an Olympic sport, he'd easily have walked off with the gold medal.
The most glorious claim of all was that enemies of democracy would battle ever harder the nearer democracy loomed.
This was a convolution that would have drawn a round of applause from Orwell, it was so fantastical. What, in effect, Blair was claiming was that, the more the violence grew, the nearer to victory we were. So no matter how chaotic the scenes became; this fact was not to be a matter of worry, it was rather a sure sign of our success.
There can be no surprise that he is the last man in Europe signing that tune. It's the political equivalent of Tourett's. What a sad ending for a man who promised so much.
And it needn't have turned out this way.
Thank you, Tony. Goodbye. Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out.
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