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May God Judge Blair More KindlylThan British History
The smart way to leave a job is suddenly. You amaze everyone with the announcement on Wednesday, clear your desk on Thursday, hold the farewell bash on Friday, then vanish. In reality, however, the bigger the job, the harder it proves to relinquish it. Almost all top people stay too long.
Since Tony Blair has occupied Britain's most important office for a decade, we should be unsurprised that getting him out of it has proved so difficult.
This has been bad for him and bad for us. For months, government has been in limbo, excepting a few dramatic actions which Blair has performed without asking anybody else, such as spending his last weekend in power signing up Britain to a new EU Constitution.
Even now, the man will not recognise that it is over, over, over. His old buddy George in the White House appears to have accepted his proposal that Blair should become 'international Middle East peace envoy'. Far from leaving the stage, Blair intends to commit himself to a historic mission of reconciling Israelis and Palestinians.
There is no doubt that he is sincere in his commitment to Middle East peace and justice for the Palestinians. But sincerity has never been Blair's problem.
He was sincere in thinking that it was acceptable to take money for Labour from Bernie Ecclestone, sincere in supposing that there were WMDs in Iraq, sincere in wanting Britain's schools and hospitals to get better, sincere in believing there was nothing wrong with his wife's richly-rewarded lecture tours.
The difficulty, which everyone but himself can see across the Bristol Channel, is that nobody any longer believes a word he says.
It is risible to suggest that he can present himself in Jerusalem, Gaza or the West Bank as an honest broker and impartial negotiator. Israelis and Palestinians will at last find common ground - their shared contempt for Tony Blair.
An ex-prime minister who dispatched his chief honours salesman, Lord Levy, as a personal envoy to the Middle East scarcely inspires confidence.
When the same man has become notorious around the world as President Bush's accomplice in Iraq, America's foreign point man in the 'War On Terror', then we have what was called in the Vietnam era 'a credibility gap'.
To be a successful confidence man, an unfamiliar face is essential. The gullible tourist to whom you wish to sell Tower Bridge must never have heard of you.
In this case, however, the would-be salesman has been all over TV screens for years, peddling Tower Bridge to some other poor sucker last week, the Albert Memorial the week before.
Blair's enthusiasm for the Middle East role reflects a characteristic that has grown ever more apparent: absolute lack of self-knowledge. This is entwined with his religious convictions.
He decided some time ago that if he wanted to continue to govern (never mind sustain respect for his wife) it was essential to ignore all slings and arrows directed at either of them.
I have no idea whether he stil reads newspapers, but I doubt it.
His relationship with God has fortified a disdain for less exalted critics, voters and pundits. As long as he can make everything right with a Higher Power, he is satisfied that he need not worry too much about what mere mortals think.
His visit to the Pope last weekend seems most significant. He intends to convert to Roman Catholicism, and has been able to secure an assurance from the absolute top man, terrestrially speaking, that he will be welcome. We do not know what sins he plans to confess, but he is assured of absolution.
Bringing God into politics is usually mistaken and always distasteful. Churchill never did it, nor Thatcher. They simply got on with governing as best they could and hoped that posterity would look favourably upon what they did.
Blair, by contrast, has been impelled for years, or at least since his second election victory in 2001, by an almost insane moral conceit. If he thinks something is all right, and hears God giving him the same message, then it is.
His attitude makes possible a notable contempt for democracy, for it enables him to shrug off charges that would cause a more sensitive man to blush crimson.
He should have resigned his office after the 2003 Iraq WMD catastrophe. The fact that he was not obliged to do so exposed the shamelessness of both the Prime Minister and his party.
There is no doubt that Blair is the most remarkable British politician of modern times. His three election victories testify to that, together with his extraordinary powers of oratory. No one who has heard him make a big speech, or fencing at the Commons Despatch Box, could doubt his powers.
In his early years, he also profited from his skill in personal encounters. Tony possessed that essential ingredient of charm - the ability to make almost anyone whom he met believe that he or she was the most important person in the world. He is a superb listener, a rare gift at the top of politics.
Unfortunately, however, early in the 21st Century this became a wasting asset. People started to notice that however much he nodded, agreed or promised, the next day he was likely to do the exact opposite. His neighbour at 11 Downing Street had complaints of his own on that score.
Thus Blair's reputation was progressively transformed from that of honest Tony, 'a pretty straight sort of guy' as he modestly described himself in 1997, into tricky Tony, a Prime Minister who would say absolutely anything to absolutely anybody to get his way.
Though he possessed a mask of honesty signally absent in his favourite acolytes Mandelson and Campbell, Britain learned to understand that, like Peter and Alastair, its Prime Minister existed in a moral vacuum, where any words or deeds were acceptable which served the purposes of self-advancement.
History will grant Blair full credit for his contribution to peace in Northern Ireland.
It has been his good fortune, rather than his achievement, to preside over this country in a decade of unparalleled prosperity, which has done more than anything else to keep him in Downing Street.
He has failed in his declared mission of 1997, to bring major improvement to public services, above all education and health, despite allowing his Chancellor to squander huge sums on them.
His domestic objectives were almost always honourable, but his government wretchedly lacked the executive skills to fulfil them.
His obsession with presentation at the expense of substance is today plain to the British people.
He is a man of much greater gifts than his predecessor, John Major, but he has squandered and prostituted these, above all in the service of George Bush.
Iraq will be his chief legacy, a foreign policy catastrophe for Britain as well as for the Iraqi people. Blair may be able to convince the Catholic Church that he is not a bad man, but he has abused power to do a remarkable number of bad things.
He should hope that he is correct in supposing that his God will judge him more charitably than British history is likely to.