Matt T

Tony Blair goes

It's really happening. That's a sigh of relief you hear all around you - I think all but the most die-hard Blairite probably thinks he has gone on a bit too long.

It seems a long time since 1997, that's for certain, although maybe that's just me. I remember the tremendous sense of excitement of his first few weeks in office, when it really seemed as if the country was being governed in a vastly superior way to the last few years of the Major administration. Indeed, despite the long-running Blair/Brown fiasco, the resignation of a seemingly abnormal number of Cabinet Ministers (some twice - I wonder if there are any statistics on whether there were more resignations than under Major or Thatcher), it's never quite reached the depths that the 1987-1997 Conservative governments did, particularly in 1990 and 1995.

How he will be remembered as a PM, I don't know. When people say that, do they mean by professional historians or the public? I've read quite a bit of history about our ex-PMs and I would struggle to write a paragraph about most of them. Anyway Iraq, Northern Ireland and very high house prices seem the most likely [1]. He deserves some credit for going of his own accord, but I suppose it wasn't much of his own accord.

The BBC points out that the morning of the election in 1997 Blair was contemplating a coalition with Paddy Ashdown's Liberal Democrats. I'm not sure how seriously that should be taken - there was a lot of denial about the opinion polls on both sides, but a lot of commentators (I remember in particular a Bagehot column in The Economist) were talking about the forthcoming landslide. I suppose after 1992 it paid to be cautious - anyway, I wonder how things would have turned out differently if he had required a pact.

[1] On that topic, reading Mrs Thatcher's autobiography the other day (as you do) she defends a windfall tax on banks on the grounds they did not earn the money through better service or cutting costs. I wonder if the Tories could justify a tax on house price gains in the same way?).

Update: There's devolution as well, I forgot that. I think some of these statements of the usual suspects' views are quite interesting. Neil Kinnock makes a good point about his winning elections, but of course we knew that, that's the thought we have of Blair when we think about his other achievements. Kinnock also say "the government which he has led has produced conditions in which people expect stable affluence. That is unprecedented.". I'm not sure if it is unprecedented, but certainly I think there is a case that the lurching from economic crisis to economic crisis has ended.

There's more here in Le Monde, which I think (though my French is not very good) has written John Smith out of history. He is rather forgotten, isn't he? I always liked Bryan Gould, though a friend used to say his hair was like Labour's policies - it looked good at a glance, but in more detail you realised there was nothing there.

Labels: Blair

posted by Matthew @ 5/10/2007 03:19:00 PM Comments: 21