Britain delivers damning verdict on Blair's 10 years

There was an infamous Downing Street memo, leaked about a year ago, that stated that Blair's plans when he evacuated Downing Street were to leave the 'crowds wanting more'.

It was a ridiculously vain piece of nonsense. However, the distance between that intention and the way the British public actually feel about Blair as he enters his final months in office has been revealed by a new Observer newspaper poll, and the results will not make pleasant reading for the PM.

The poll reveals that almost half of voters consider the outgoing Prime Minister as out of touch, untrustworthy and overly concerned with spin, while 57 per cent think he has stayed in office too long.

And with elections next month in Scotland, England and Wales, there is every chance that Blair could be facing electoral meltdown as support haemorrhages from him. It was hardly the exit that he and his supporters planned.

The Iraq war is seen as Blair's nadir, with 58 per cent judging it his biggest failure: almost two-thirds thought he had just followed America. His biggest success was the Northern Ireland peace process, followed by Bank of England independence.

The truth is that Blair has actually been a very good Prime Minister who made one fatal mistake and that mistake has now threatened to overtake his entire ten years in office.

His reasoning for joining Bush in Iraq will be the subject of close scrutiny in every biography of him that follows with supporters explaining his rationale and critics questioning his wisdom. But the word Iraq will be the thing that decides whether you deem his term of office a success or a failure.

It is no secret that I belong to the latter of the two groups. Nor do I buy the theory that Blair's reasoning for following Bush into Iraq was honourable.

Blair had enjoyed a close personal relationship with the outgoing Democratic President Clinton and had determined that he was not going to allow the Tories to exploit the fact that the new incoming regime were Republicans, so he set out to forge as close a relationship as possible with the Bush regime. His reasoning was no more honourable than that. When Bush declared his intention to invade Iraq, it was simply unthinkable to Blair that the UK should not be at America's side.

So he set out to convince the country of why we had to invade Iraq. To accomplish this end he employed dodgy dossiers and exaggerated intelligence.

Shortly before the vote in the House of Commons over whether to authorise the Iraq war, it is said that Cherie was phoning MP's saying that, if they could see the evidence that was flowing across Blair's desk, then they would not hesitate to vote for war.

Of course, we now know that this was a lie. Indeed, I think this goes to the heart of why the Iraq war has lost so much public support. For Blair did not look at evidence and decide to go to war. Rather, he decided to go to war and then went looking for evidence that would justify that decision.

That single act has now come to overshadow everything else he has done whilst in office.

Loyalists also hit back. 'I have never heard anybody talk about the years before 1997 as the good old days,' said Alan Milburn, the former Labour party chairman. 'The story is no longer about leaking classrooms, falling standards, lengthening hospital waiting lists or a Britain unique in lacking a minimum wage. Prosperity is being spread, poverty being eroded and services have been improved. I have no doubt history will smile kindly on Tony Blair's 10 years.'

I have to say that I broadly agree with Milburn that no-one will talk of the Major era as "the good old days" and that there is much that Blair has achieved - in terms of redistribution of wealth, investment in public services, the advancement of the rights of gays and persecuted minorities - that broadly fitted into an almost classic Labour agenda.

However, his decision to invade Iraq - for no better reason than it was on the agenda of a Republican president - drove an instant wedge between Blair and the party that he led. Not that this would have greatly concerned him as he always believed the Labour Party were dinosaurs that he had to drag screaming and kicking into the 21st century.

However, as the WMD failed to materialise, and the general public began to learn more about just how shaky the evidence against Saddam had been all along, support for the man naive enough to think that he would enjoy a "Baghdad bounce" began to evaporate. Bereft of public support and alienated from the grassroots of his own party, Blair's final years in office have been a curious mixture of isolation and an almost insane optimism that history will judge him kinder than we all presently do.

And, in a curious way, he is right. In terms of his domestic policies there were successes, but if he thinks there will be some kind of historical revisionism regarding the worst foreign policy disaster since Suez, then his years out of office will be just as lonely as the last few years have been in office.

And just as when one mentions the name Anthony Eden the next word to hit your brain is Suez, so will Iraq be forever attached to Blair's tomb, obscuring any good that he might otherwise be remembered for.

And he has no-one to blame but himself.

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Tags: Blair, Iraq war, Bush, neo-cons, Saddam, Republican party