The tragic premiership of Tony Blair

Theodore Dalrymple delivers a blistering (and very thorough) attack on Tony Blair's domestic record and, indeed, the character of the man himself:

Blair, then, is no hero. Many in Britain believe that he has been the worst prime minister in recent British history, morally and possibly financially corrupt, shallow and egotistical, a man who combined the qualities of Elmer Gantry with those of Juan Domingo Perón.

Dalrymple's article is worth reading in full, lest we forget the full range of New Labour's iniquities under Tony Blair. The "purer than pure" government which became enmeshed in one financial scandal after another, Bernie Ecclestone, Peter Mandelson, Geoffrey Robinson, Lakshmi Mittal, the Hinduja brothers; the incompetence: passports, the Home Office generally, constitutional chaos, the voting reforms which have hopelessly compromised the integrity of our electoral system; the politicisation of the civil service, the sidelining of parliament, authoritarianism on a grand scale. And that's just scratching the surface.

Blair's domestic record is woeful, and Dalrymple is right to condemn it. How interesting, however, that he has focussed on the domestic situation and ignored international affairs. The received wisdom now that Blair has left to solve the problems of the Middle East is that he is a tragic figure: a good prime minister with a sound domestic record, but brought low by his foolhardy and maybe even criminal foreign policy.

Dalrymple illustrates that the opposite is the case. It was Blair's domestic record which lost him the trust of the British people before he needed to call upon it most. The argument for war in Iraq was rejected by the people most probably because the people already believed the government to be untrustworthy - forever hiding behind spin. In fact Tony Blair's courage in foreign policy simply masks his cowardice in domestic policy. He was brave enough to take on the threat of global terror in Iraq and Afghanistan - his program of domestic reform failed to take on and defeat his gravest domestic enemy: the Labour Party. A tragedy indeed.