I suppose I can’t let the day pass without comment on the fact that Mr. Tony Blair has finally confirmed that we will actually see the back of him before the end of June, though I must concede I am struggling to know what to say except that the manner of his departure was befitting of his premiership – overhyped; stage managed to within an inch of its life; overflowing with hypocrisy and bad acting; and cynically timed to divert attention from bad news.

In an act of media absurdity Chris Morris would struggle to top, ITV1 interrupted its morning schedule to announce the “breaking news” (sic) that Blair had left Downing Street and was en route to an RAF airfield to fly to deliver his address to a grateful nation from his constituency.

Our brave news broadcasters hired helicopters to film Blair’s motorcade driving from an airfield in Teeside to the Sedgefield Labour Club – and took ordinary programming off the air in order to air that vital footage. Get your priorities right, Michael Grade: some of us were trying to watch The Jeremy Kyle Show and This Morning, dammit!

As Blair strode to the podium to begin overemoting, the Bank of England announced that it was increasing the base interest rate for the fourth time in six months to a six-year high. Pure coincidence, I’m sure.

And while every rentaquote MP and political commentator with a mortgage to pay was rushing from microphone to camera this afternoon (and oh, how we missed the late Robin Cook today), a Home Office announcement – delayed by a month – revealed that the cost of Blair’s vainglorious ID card scheme has risen by a further £400,000,000 in the past six months alone.  The total scheme is now estimated to be costing taxpayers £5,310,000,000, or £88.50 for every man, woman and child in the nation. Oh, and then we all have to pay a further £93 actually to get a card. Bargain.

The speech itself was oddly nondescript. I’m just not sure how many more of these final farewells I can cope with. It’s like watching the hammiest actor in the world performing a death scene, falling to the boards in slow motion and twitching, jerking, moaning and groaning while rolling around the stage to delay for another second or two his last input to the production.

Blair gets some sympathy from me insofar as The Left (if such a thing exists anymore) is comprised of idealistic dreamers who tend to view anything short of Blake’s Jerusalem as failure. No Socialist or Social Democrat politician can ever deliver everything that their base demands. So there was SOME truth in Blair’s claim today that expectations in 1997 were too high. But there is MORE truth his earlier admission that he should have made bigger changes, earlier. HE missed the opportunity and, in so doing, HE disappointed and disenchanted a generation of electors.

Any Prime Minister of the past 40 years would have given their right arms to have delivered the sort of settlement in Northern Ireland that played out last Tuesday. While the likes of Major, Trimble, Hume, Mallon and even Thatcher have to take some of the credit for laying the foundations, Blair’s personal achievement of getting Paisley, Adams and McGuinness to work alongside each other is genuinely impressive and – we hope – a new start for the people of the island of Ireland.

There is much else of which Blair can be proud – the minimum wage, civil partnerships, the Human Rights Act, the Freedom of Information Act, genuinely massive investment in the National Health Service, devolution. Britain has had a remarkably stable economy for a full decade, even if there are now signs that the wheels are coming loose.

Of course, it would be nice if the minimum wage could buy more than a can of baked beans, if Blair hadn’t tried to rig so many devolution and Mayoralty votes, if his own government didn’t undermine and badmouth the Human Rights Act and try to wriggle out of its FoI obligations, and if one of his many Health Secretaries hadn’t dismantled internal markets in the NHS before another of his many Health Secretaries re-established internal markets in the NHS, throwing away so much of that investment. But, to a certain extent, many of these and other criticisms arise from ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’.

More seriously, Blair’s administrations have assaulted civil liberties every which way and played fast and loose too often with legality and their obligations to abide by the law. They spun and spun until it became a habit and lies blurred into the truth.  Our jails are overflowing (tough on the causes of crime, eh?).  The poor are poorer, in relative terms, than they were a decade ago.  Public transport is a shambles.  Our hospitals are filthy and our classrooms are crumbling – except for those shiny but malfunctioning buildings constructed under PFI deals for which we will pay more and pay longer than we would have under any public effort.I’ll give credit – begrudgingly – where it’s due: the society of the United Kingdom is, overall, a better place in which to live on 10 May 2007 than it was on 1 May 1997 for most of its citizens. It is not, however, the place it could have been if Tony Blair had made the most of the opportunity handed to him on a plate in 1997 and I contend that, if anything, the Kingdom is less United than it was when he entered 10 Downing Street.

Everything, of course, pales into insignificance when positioned against the colossal failure that is Iraq: whatever good Tony Blair did, the 100,000+ cadavers that litter the Middle East and the ghosts of Harrowdown Hill, Aldgate, Edgware Road, Russell Square and Tavistock Square represent his true legacy.

It’s about trust, Stupid, and this country hasn’t trusted its Prime Minister for three or four years.  The last year in particular has been, frankly, embarrassing: he should have gone long ago.

Blair is not solely responsible for the lack of trust between the electorate and the executive, but he has a lot to do with it.  While on holiday last week, I watched the DVD of the first series of The Thick Of It. If Yes, (Prime) Minister summed up the way government ‘worked’ in the late 70s and early 80s, then The Thick Of It sums up the way Blair’s government ‘worked’ – in a frenzy of panic over the presentation of fluff. What a shabby taste to leave in the electorate’s mouth.

I couldn’t vote in the 1997 General Election as I was living and working abroad, but I was in the UK on the day of the vote and I travelled a couple of hundred miles around the country during 2 May 1997 and saw for myself the real hope and genuine goodwill that the new government had. It DID feel as though a new day had dawned; people WERE smiling on the trains.

I have never thought Blair – from his very earliest Shadow Cabinet days – was anything other than all fur coat and no knickers, but I shared that hope and goodwill. I therefore say with genuine regret that I feel there won’t be too many people (apart from the sadly deluded Alan Milburns and Tessa Jowells of this world) who will go to sleep tonight feeling anything other than that – on balance – he outstayed his welcome and he really rather ballsed it up.

Things Can Only Get Better? I rather hope A Change Is Gonna Come.