KEY POINTS:
A few years ago Tony Blair was kind enough to give my wife some career counselling. She had told him she thought she might quit her job, which had become unduly burdensome.
"Well, if you want my advice, it's not a good idea to leave something until you've
got the next job lined up," said Blair. Alas for the soon-to-be ex-Prime Minister, he has not been able to take his own very sound advice.
The reason is clear: he has been forced out at least two years before he had planned to go. Whether the Labour Party was right to do that, we shall discover: what is astonishing is that so many commentators declared that Blair had, uniquely for a prime minister, "gone at a time of his own choosing".
It is a tribute to Blair's strange powers of suggestion that he has convinced so many of this obvious fallacy.
He has been less successful in fooling commentators into believing that he is happy to be succeeded by Brown. Apart from anything else - or, rather, apart from everything else - it was the Chancellor who single-handedly thwarted Blair from realising the destiny he thought was his: to take Britain into the euro, and thereby "the heart of Europe".
Cynics - there are one or two of them in Westminster - argue Blair's politically fatal embrace of George Bush and the Iraq campaign stem from that moment: the self-declared man of destiny needed another world-historical role, and if it couldn't be with Europe, then the Anglo-American relationship would have to furnish it - even if it meant Britain's relationship with Europe would get worse, rather than better.
This, I think, is mistaken, and not just because the chronology does not exactly fit the theory. There is an even more cynical explanation, which, rather disconcertingly, was suggested to me by a man I had always taken to be one of the Prime Minister's closest advisers and friends.
When I asked him to explain the basis of Blair's various foreign policy adventures he laughed: "Oh, Tony's just a girl who likes to go to all the best dances."
That analysis, entirely congruent with the view that the Prime Minister was above all an actor looking for the biggest stages to display his histrionic talent, is one that the man himself would deny furiously.
The view - that Blair is not at all normal, and suffers from some sort of "Messiah" complex, is popular. Yet that is hard to reconcile with personal experience: whenever I met Tony Blair, I have been struck by his sheer normality. In private he is self-effacing, relaxed, unimposing and always interested in genuine conversation, rather than the sound of his own voice. He seems as sane as anyone could be after a long period as Prime Minister.
In that respect, whatever the loss of public trust, he is as attractive a personality now as he was 10 years ago. It is, in its own way, a remarkable achievement.
- Independent