And so, for the last time, we go to sleep with Tony Blair as our Prime Minister.

Between them, Andrew Rawnsley’s and Michael Cockerill’s recent films – for Channel 4 and BBC2 respectively – have provided the definitive account of the last decade.  Perhaps surprisingly, Paddy Ashdown provided the most fitting summary of the Blair premiership.  He said Blair has been a good Prime Minister but, had he taken his chances, he could have been a great Prime Minister – and that is his tragedy.

If you had said ten years ago that Blair’s administrations would perform competently enough, domestically and economically, to be re-elected twice and that he would – in the process – have achieved a (seemingly) permanent peace settlement in Northern Ireland, everyone would have expected Mr. Tony would be riding off into a rose-tinted sunset set fair for a well-deserved retirement on the red leather benches of the House of Lords and the highly-paid American lecture circuit.

If you had said ten years ago that the same man declaring that his administrations would be “whiter than white” and that he was a “pretty straight kind of guy” who “would never do anything to harm the country or anything improper” would stand down in 2007 as: (a) the first sitting Prime Minister to have been questioned by the police as part of a criminal investigation regarding the alleged selling of honours; (b) having lost along the way such close allies as Peter Mandelson and David Blunkett – twice apiece! – to scandals implicating financial or administrative impropriety; (c) having leant on his Attorney General to change his advice on the legality of invading a sovereign state for the sole purpose of regime change; (d) having had to convince his wife to apologise publically for involving a convicted con man in the family’s private financial dealings; (e) having led the most reactionary government of the modern era, introducing measure after measure to erode our civil rights; and (f) having overseen the dropping of corruption charges against British Aerospace on the grounds that it might damage the nation’s relationship with the anti-democratic Saudi Arabian regime… they’d have carried you away in a straitjacket.

A decade’s a fuck of a long time in politics and Blair’s imminent appointment as The Quartet’s envoy to the Middle East is a sick fucking joke.  Go and fill your boots, you warmongerer: let’s hope senility gets you like it has Thatcher – then you’ll find out just how important those people are who wipe people’s backsides for £5 an hour.

The Minister’s favourite (extant) band Crowded House have just declared, live on BBC Radio 2, “That [song] was for Tony Blair: good riddance!”  I can’t echo the sentiment enough: indeed, “may his trousers fall down as he bows to the Queen and the Crown.”

While the Minister will not go on a 48-hour bender as he did the weekend after Thatcher was unceremoniously dumped, he will be marking Bliar’s passing tomorrow evening with a close friend and some large Scotches, so we’re planning to miss out Wednesday and come up smiling on Thursday…  A toute a l’heure.