Blair takes his final bow.

I remember only too well the day he entered office. It was a bright May morning and the entire nation felt as if it was a new dawn. Even friends of mine who were Tory and who couldn't bring themselves to vote for him admitted that, after eighteen years of Tory rule, it was time for a change.

He had been elected with the largest landslide in a 100 years. Looking back on the images of the young man making his way to the Palace to ask the Queen for permission to form his cabinet, he looks impossibly young, but then, don't we all after ten years?

At noon Mr Blair leaves Downing Street to attend his last PMQs in the House of Commons. Despite the huge platform for photographers and camera crews being set up outside No 10, he is not planning to say any words as he leaves.

His start was actually surprisingly tame, earning him the nickname "Bambi", he certainly never behaved like a man who was carrying a mandate from the British people and the largest majority seen for a century.

The task he set himself was gargantuan and actually much more difficult to achieve than anything Thatcher had set for herself. Thatcher set out to make cuts which, of course, one can achieve with the swift movement of a pen. Blair set out to transform the civil service and to restore the damage done to the health service and to the education system after eighteen years of Tory disinvestment.

So, for the first four or five years not a lot seemed to be happening. Indeed, it was only after he went to the polls for a second time and was confronted by the wife of a cancer sufferer during the election campaign on the steps of a hospital that Blair's premiership seemed to invigorate itself. He suddenly seemed to stop worrying about being liked and set about transforming Britain.

New hospitals began to open and old ones had facelifts, the nurses that he had been training over the last five years were, at last, ready to take up their posts. The second term seemed energised leaving behind the timidity of the first.

His military action in Kosovo was wildly popular sold as an intervention to stop ethnic cleansing.

He will then return to No 10 and say farewells to staff, many of whom - including chief of staff Jonathan Powell and press bosses David Hill and Tom Kelly - are leaving Downing Street with him.

His highlights include bringing in the minimum wage, lowering the age of consent for gay sex, introducing paternal leave for fathers, enabling the economy to rise to the fourth largest in the world, overseeing the largest drop in unemployment for decades, and - the jewel in his crown - negotiating a lasting peace in Northern Ireland.

After 3,708 days in Downing Street, Mr Blair will formally tender his resignation to the Queen shortly after 1pm. Accompanied by Cherie, he will make the five-minute drive to Buckingham Palace. Mrs Blair will wait in an anteroom while Mr Blair says farewell to the Queen. No written resignation is necessary: his word is enough.

There can be no denying that the Britain he leaves behind is a nicer, more liberal, fairer society than the one he inherited. Indeed, he has changed the political landscape to such an extent that David Cameron, in order to have any chance of being elected, has had to abandon the Tory rhetoric of the past and scramble towards the middle ground, even if his party do not seem to want to follow him on that path.

He will probably then head for Chequers, the prime minister's official residence, in Buckinghamshire, which he has been allowed to hang on to for a few days to say farewell to staff there. The house the Blairs have bought in Connaught Square, near Hyde Park, is still not ready.

I personally believe that his early success in Kosovo blinded him to the danger of wars. Unlike Clinton, who had his fingers burnt in Somalia, Blair always associated wars abroad with success. I well remember Blair walking through Kosovo and the crowds, those large emotional crowds chanting, "Tony, Tony, Tony." It was moving enough to witness as a bystander, I can only imagine how that would effect the main protagonist.

For a few minutes the country will be prime minister-less. But as Mr Blair leaves Buckingham Palace, Gordon Brown will head there - probably with wife Sarah. The Queen will invite him to form a government. He will immediately take on Mr Blair's protection squad.

Then came the election of Bush, 9-11, and what appeared - to those of us on the left - as Blair's descent into madness.

I give money to his party and worked with my local Labour party, pounding the streets, to help ensure his election and subsequent re-election. Therefore, it was with some sense of unreality that I found myself, with two million others, marching through London demanding that he rethink his plans to join Bush in attacking Iraq.

In the preamble to the war there were many who spoke of the "Baghdad bounce", as if - once Saddam had been toppled - we would all see the error of our ways and rise applauding. I never bought into that notion. I thought at the time that, although he would succeed, he would return to a Britain that was sullen and a Labour Party who would never forgive him for circumventing the United Nations.

Iraq's subsequent descent into chaos and civil war, the non existent weapons of mass destruction and Blair's stubborn refusal to ever countenance the notion that he might have made a mistake drove a permanent wedge between Blair and the grassroots of his party.

When he joined Bush in refusing to call for a ceasefire during the Israel-Lebanon war last summer, he crossed an ideological bridge too far for the party to ignore it. Immediately, coups were launched and Blair - in order to remain in office - had to promise that the speech to party conference he was about to give, would be his last one.

It was over. He had started the clock ticking on his premiership.

And today it ends. What to say, what to say? It would be easy for an old leftie like myself to harp on about the Iraq war and how that will be his lasting legacy. And Iraq has undeniably stained and, in many ways, defined his premiership. But there were many achievements under Blair.

And I do genuinely believe that the country he leaves behind is a better and fairer one than the country he inherited, even if he leaves it still embroiled in an unwinnable and immoral war.

Blair. He was a very good Prime Minister. The tragedy, for me, is that he could have been a great one. But, like so many British Prime Ministers, Britain was never enough for him. Eventually, he got the smell of that world stage in his nostrils and found that he was more appreciated overseas than he was back at home. And, whilst he was accepting plaudits from an admiring overseas audience, back at Westminster plotters were plotting.

Like Thatcher before him, he was brought down - not by the opposition - but by his own party. With Thatcher, it was her unwavering stance on Europe which alienated conservatives. With Blair, it was his unwavering loyalty to Bush which eventually became too much for his own party to stomach.

And so today he takes his final bow. There is much to criticise, and regular readers here will know that I have never been slow to do so. However, there is also much to applaud. And, as Blair bows, I will do so. There was a day though - pre-Iraq - when I would have given him a standing ovation.

Tags: Blair, Labour, Prime Minister, retirement, Iraq war, achievements