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letter from london: The British scene.

Bye-Bye, BlairWhy do Brits dislike the departing prime minister?

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Posted Wednesday, May 9, 2007, at 3:19 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

And that explains why in opinion polls so many of the British say—bafflingly on the face of it—that they are worse off, or worse served by the National Health Service, than they were 10 years ago. The statistical evidence shows that this cannot be so, but then polls are often used as displacement activity, with people saying they are angry about one thing and really meaning they are angry about another.

We remember the "dodgy dossier" and the other fraudulent claims made before the war—and Blair's subsequent refusal to apologize for them. We remember the horrible way the Blair junta "outed" as a source Dr. David Kelly, a distinguished government official, who then killed himself, and the way the junta nearly destroyed the BBC for reporting that the intelligence had been "sexed up" to justify the invasion.

Then we remember the "Downing Street memo," which later came to light, written in great secrecy for Blair's eyes in July 2002 and confirming that, with a decision for war already taken in Washington, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Not sexed-up, just fixed. Those words might be Blair's epitaph.

To be sure, he still has his defenders, but what's so telling is where you find them on the political spectrum. From an early stage, it was clear that he was a man of the right leading a party of the left, and it's not surprising that this has produced more than a few tensions and paradoxes. Even now, his most ardent admirers are way outside the Labor Party. "Brave, eloquent and in charge … a prime minister not just a party leader"—that was Charles Moore, former editor of the Conservative Daily Telegraph.

"Tony Blair will go down in history as one of the greatest premiers of the postwar period. His destruction of British socialism and his principled, tough and timely prosecution of the war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism make him a giant"—that was right-wing historian Andrew Roberts, now a court favorite of George Bush and Dick Cheney. With friends like that ...

No wonder that those who once rallied to Blair now feel such bitter disappointment. The most poignant moment in that BBC series came near the end. Robert Harris is known to Americans as a best-selling novelist (Fatherland, Pompeii, etc.), but he was originally a political journalist. He befriended Blair early and had closer access to him than any other during the 1997 election campaign.

And now? "I do think it's a tragedy," Harris said of his friend's career. "Blair was of my generation, and this was our shot, if you like." Then he added with studious understatement, "And I won't say that we messed it up but that it perhaps hasn't lived up to all the expectations of the rosy-fingered dawn of May the first, 1997." A tragedy for sure—but is Tony Blair its greatest victim?