The spell is broken: in the post-Blair world, we might ask: what did he ever do?

National Review, July 30, 2007 by John O'Sullivan

THERE was a certain pathos about the last days of Tony Blair's premiership. A sort of Grand Tour of Statesmanship--a visit to Africa, a swansong at the White House, one last Euro-Summit committing Britain to further loss of sovereignty--had been carefully timed and set up. An official memo leaked last year had sketched the emotional atmosphere to be created at and by these events. Its theme would be that a great star was making his exit, leaving the audience still wanting more.

On the day itself the media did their best to make the constitutional transfer of power from one prime minister to another seem a unique historical event. Blair left Downing Street for the last time as PM to applause, his departure only slightly marred by the report that police had interviewed him for the third time in the "Cash for Peerages" scandal a few days before. He received tributes from opponents and an ovation at Prime Minister's Question Time. Because this ran overtime, the BBC cut out the last five minutes and switched to a sports program. It has since apologized for this extraordinary misjudgment. That was the only technical hitch in Blair's long goodbye and it generated sympathy for him.

But the fact is that the audience didn't want more. They had wanted less for some time. And now that Blair has gone, he is hardly missed. It is as if the magician has left the stage, the spell has been broken, and we are left looking at rags that we once mistook for riches. His successor, Gordon Brown, has made a strong start. He has been helped to do so by terrorists who created a mood of national sobriety suited to Brown's stern personality. He has also appointed the former head of the Royal Navy, a formidable old sea salt by all accounts, to knock Britain's security into shape, among a mixed bag of "imaginative" appointments from all parties and none. We are now in a post-Blair world.

This may be a temporary mood--given time, Brown is perfectly capable of making us nostalgic for the Blair premiership--but it is the mood at present. And it raises serious questions, as they say in Scotland Yard, about the personality and political character of Tony Blair.

THE AMERICAN FRIEND

Such questions are unlikely to be asked by Americans who are mystified when they learn of Blair's unpopularity in Britain. The U.S. will miss Blair in an uncomplicated way. He defended the U.S.--both on Iraq and in general--with greater eloquence and forensic skill than any contemporary American politician. He made Prime Minister's Question Time essential watching for the C-SPAN crowd. Like Margaret Thatcher, he's a friend as well as an ally.

Some of Blair's stateside popularity is explained culturally as a result of the debating skills that a politician in the parliamentary tradition naturally acquires. But it is also traceable to Blair's manifest affection for the U.S.

That affection is genuine but also, in part, misinformed. He likes America because it is "modern" and "a young country," just as he gets irritated with Britain because it is mired in tradition, old, and in thrall to the "forces of conservatism." But all sorts of misconceptions are intertwined here. To start with, the U.S. is not a young country in a constitutional sense. In fact it is one of the oldest countries in the world, its constitution dating from 1789--which also saw the start of what was merely the first of five French republics. America considered more broadly is the continuation of British traditions of law and government, in particular the Whig tradition of ordered liberty. Politically speaking, America and Britain are the same age. Admittedly, America is "modern" in the sense of being in the forefront of new products, fashions, and ideas, but that is largely because its ancient constitutional and political traditions have fostered economic freedom, social progress, and technical innovation. Britain lags slightly behind the U.S., but it is still ahead of most of the world in such matters.

Blair's misunderstanding of America is a reflection of his deeper ideological commitment to the ideal of modernity itself. That produced one of the funnier episodes of Blair's first term. According to the well-informed satirical magazine Private Eye, Blair once arranged for a British tabloid to run an article by the Japanese prime minister. This would say nice things about the country and thus, it was hoped, avert any embarrassingly hostile receptions of the kind previous Japanese leaders had experienced in London at the hands of former POWs. To make assurance doubly sure, Alastair Campbell, Blair's press spokesman and Britain's own "Sultan of Spin," wrote a draft hymning the virtues of modern "Cool Britannia" with its supermodels, celebrity chefs, and brutalist fashion designers. When the Japanese received it, the prime minister added important things that had somehow been omitted, praising Britain for its tradition of fair play, cricket, impartial judges in wigs, tolerance and eccentricity, bobbies, the Queen, and in general the "forces of conservatism." The resulting mish-mash duly appeared in the tabloid, whose readers probably saw no contradiction in it.