Blair has achieved what all successful British Prime Ministers achieve: he has changed both his own party and the opposition. David Cameron would not exist politically without Tony Blair, in the same way that Blair would not without Thatcher.
Yet there’s no single achievement of the Blair years that transcends everything else—which is why it is so difficult to work out where history will rank him. (Mary Ann Sieghart, though, had some eloquent first thoughts on the subject in The Times this morning)
Blair didn’t, thankfully, succeed in taking us into the Euro. Devolution has never really been a Blair project, it is something he inherited from John Smith. On the economy, the story is what he hasn’t done—radically hike taxes etc.—rather than any positive achievement. Public services-wise it has, for all the song and dance made about it, been tinkering around the edges.
Foreign policy is a legacy possibility. But for all the controversy surrounding the invasion of Iraq Blair was actually just following the traditional post-Suez British foreign policy aim of maintaining the Atlantic alliance, as Toby Young pointed out the other day.
Northern Ireland is, I suppose, what will be flagged up as the singular achievement. But that deal will, I suspect, look a lot less good in time.
But maybe, to sound rather post-modern, the legacy is that there isn’t a legacy. In this age of globalisation, it is far harder for politicians to be truly radical. Maybe, ushering in a less ideological, more managerial style of politics in which even successful PMs don’t leave behind Thatcher or Attlee sized legacies is Blair’s legacy.
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