The Osterley Times: The Great Pretender takes his final bow.

I was out of the country last week when Blair finally succumbed to the inevitable and named the day that he would leave office. Though I couldn't help but notice that, even as he fell on his sword, he misrepresented what we were witnessing.

"The only way to conquer the pull of power is to set it down."

This gives the clear impression that he has decided to stand down of his own accord, indeed, it implies that he is actually being honourable whilst doing so and deciding that the "pull of power" is something that men of honour like himself somehow manage to avoid being lured by.

This totally ignores the fact that it was only a coup last year which ever brought him to state before a thankful Labour conference that this would be the last time he ever addressed them as their leader.

He makes it sound like none of this happened and that he has decided "enough is enough" which is markedly different from what has actually taken place here.

Indeed, the doors of Number Ten have the marks of his fingernails such was his desire not to be forced through those doors.

He then mounted what many have depicted as his defence and his mea culpa, both of which I regard as false impressions of what we have witnessed. He stated:

"Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right," he said. "I may have been wrong. That's your call. But believe one thing if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country."

As defences go, it's a rather weak one and not dissimilar from the type of defence that could be constructed by Saddam or Mugabe. I mean it's an almost meaningless claim. Is he arguing that other politicians do things that they know to be bad for the country? And that, if that is not their intention, then any action they take is ultimately forgivable?

For the truth is that there were many people advising Blair that the action he was about to embark on was not a clever one. Two million of us marched through London begging him to reconsider the suicidal course he had set for himself, he ignored us.

Blair always wanted to dance on the world stage and Bush offered him the chance to do so and Blair grabbed the opportunity. Rumsfeld made clear that the US did not need Britain militarily, our function was always simply to provide the US with the fig leaf of respectability - as they ripped up international consensus - and allow the Bush administration to fool their own public that the endeavour they were embarking on was a multilateral one.

It was a decision that, even as he leaves office, he refuses to admit was wrong. He stands by the justification that he has concocted for himself, that he acted "in good faith" and that he therefore did no wrong.

I personally think his fate was sealed in Kosovo. I well remember Blair marching through a genuinely liberated people as they cried, "Tony, Tony". Grown men wept as they stretched to shake his hand. Such a thing leaves a mark on a man and I'm convinced that this left it's mark on Blair. It's why, incredulously, he and his cohorts spoke of the possibility of the Baghdad Bounce helping Labour at the election following the war. The possibility that this wouldn't be the reaction of the British people simply never occurred to Blair.

It was a great shame as there was much in his premiership to be proud of. He redistributed wealth and enhanced the rights of minorities through the introduction of civil partnerships. He invested more money into hospitals and schools which, after years of Tory misrule, produced better health charts and education results which were so good that newspapers started to ask if exams were being dumbed down.

Indeed, in Northern Ireland, he produced a peace which in any other circumstances would be the definition of a great premiership.

Sadly, as he himself now admits, his tombstone will consist of one small word.

Iraq.

And he only has himself to blame. Blair's greatest weakness was his ability to convince himself that he was right about anything. As Dominic Lawson points out:

It reminds me of a similar remark, which Mr Blair wheeled out in his Labour Party Conference speech two years ago: "I only know what I believe." Most of us, I hope, would say that this is getting things exactly the wrong way around: we should only believe what we know. This, however, is faith-based politics, to which Mr Blair has always adhered: it has nothing to do with Christianity, whatever might be said about it. The person we are being asked to have faith in is Mr Blair himself; he, in turn, obeys the emanations of his own conscience.

Blair believed that Saddam had WMD and therefore did not need proof. Indeed, he constructed dossiers out of facts that were known to be "partial" in order to convince the nation that it should go to war based on nothing more substantial than the fact that he believed.

Because of this tens of thousands of people are now dead.

What, other than that, can he possibly be remembered for? For compared to previous Labour leaders there is no substantial creation that bears his fingerprints.

The reason why Clem Attlee will always hold the palm among Labour leaders (in which capacity he served, incidentally, for a record total of 20 years) is that he actually transformed the economic and social contours of Britain. Put alongside his achievement - the National Health Service, the welfare state, to say nothing of the conquest of unemployment - Blair's impact on the life of the nation cannot help but seem pretty puny. In fact, I am sometimes tempted to suspect that it was his frustration with his failure to introduce all the radical domestic changes that he would have liked which led him to prefer playing a mixture of Woodrow Wilson and William Ewart Gladstone on the world stage - with the dismal results which he yesterday sounded strikingly unrepentant about.

There was always a fatal tendency on Blair's part - and, for that matter on George Bush's - to take a Manichean view of the universe and that seldom goes along with being either effective or efficient. It was Winston Churchill who, on the eve of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, famously remarked: "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable mention of the Devil in the House of Commons.'' It is that sense of cynical detachment in the pursuit of British interests that historians are likely to find wholly lacking in Blair's world view - consisting, as it does, of good and evil, right and wrong, darkness and light. His interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone may have justified themselves but his actions, with Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan now threaten to haunt him for the rest of his days.

Bush and Blair were perfect soul mates, both believing that reality could be what they wished it to be, rather than what it was.

They were a dreadful combination, each reinforcing the others simplistic "black or white", "with us or against us" world view.

Berlusconi, gone. Aznar, gone. And now, finally, Blair; gone.

Bush is now the only person left in power who thinks his Iraq plan was a good one. And Blair's reputation will forever be stained because of the plots he and the current American President hatched. It needn't have been so. And that is Blair's tragedy.