By Simon Jenkins in the Sunday Times:
Can Blair now salvage any dignity, if not legacy, from his endgame? His references to hospitals and schools look threadbare as the scale of waste in his turbulent reforms becomes ever more apparent. His visits to world trouble spots are desperate, as are his orotund appeals to the world to save itself from mistakes he did so little in office to correct. He has run out of time to engineer an honourable retreat from Iraq. Why he failed to move Gordon Brown from the Treasury or why he broke his pledge to stay a full term remain a mystery. He seems in retrospect a shilly-shallying leader with no killer instinct. While Blair’s legacy is a narrative for his imagination, the “legacy of Blair” is never more vivid than in the manner of his going. Cash for peerages is emblematic of a governing style that has always seemed unfit for purpose. A patronage state dominated by Downing Street can no longer bear the required weight of public confidence. Cabinet government has collapsed, as ministers campaign against each other’s policies (as on hospitals) or discard responsibility for the doings of their predecessors (as at the Home Office). When critics charge British government with being presidential they misunderstand the word. Presidencies have checks and balances. Britain under Blair has been not presidential but courtly, a place of jesters, spinners, flattery, feuds and favouritism. Above all it has revolved round patronage, whose abuse may be its downfall.
Good riddance.