Blair is not a disappointment, he is a creature of our time

THE other week, I found myself getting involved in one of those dinner-party discussions about the Prime Minister. The general tone of the conversation was not complicated. "Well, I think he’s a complete bastard," as one thirtysomething diner put it. "There I was, voting for him, thinking he was going to change the world; and now he’s turned out to be even more useless than the rest of them."

A few more experienced types demurred, of course. But the message from the majority was plain enough, and quite widely heard in Britain these days; once we believed in him, now we don’t, and we’re probably never going to vote again.

All of which added a certain melancholy tinge to those images, earlier this week, of the Prime Ministerial visit to Iraq. There was Tony in his best Kosovo mode, jeans to the fore, white shirt gleaming in the desert sun. But all around, a sense of ambivalence filled the air. Whatever the eventual outcome in Iraq, no strong sense of triumph is possible given the current difficulties facing the people there, and the power vacuum that has begun to open up in a country full of seething post-Saddam tensions.

Back home, the Prime Minister’s reputation as a man of integrity looks more fragile by the day, as the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that formed his main pretext for war disappear in a haze of allegations and counter-allegations about poor intelligence and political spin.

Worse, those who are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on Iraq are precisely the people most likely to accuse him of political snake-oil salesmanship on another front, namely his effort to talk Britain into the new European Union constitutional treaty without so much as a consultative referendum.

And to add public relations insult to political injury, towards the end of the week his place was taken on the front pages by a younger, fresher British hero in even more casual clothes; Prince William, the unbelievably handsome, plausible, pleasant and apparently well-adjusted heir to the throne, photographed on the seafront at St Andrews in poses which suggest a life so totally unsullied by the dirty business of politics as to be almost irresistible to a spin-weary public.

But before we join the general cry of Blair-bashing on one issue or another, I think we might perhaps pause and consider the extent of our own complicity in his career as a politician for whom truth is, to put it gently, a flexible commodity. When it comes to selling snake-oil, after all, it takes two to tango; and from the moment of Tony Blair’s election as Labour leader, almost a decade ago, a significant section of the British public have been in the market for every plausible line, every shimmering self-deception, that he could offer them.

The biggest of all, of course, concerned his "third way", his wishful dream - shared by millions of floating voters - of a policy that would somehow combine the best virtues of old-style social democracy and new-style Thatcherism.

It never took more than 30 seconds of political thought to establish that Tony had no real plan for achieving this synthesis; he lacked both a convincing road map for the radical improvement of British public services, and the political will to confront those vested interests which were not interested in any modification of the Thatcher revolution.

But people voted for Tone in 1997 because they were tired of Tories, and because they wanted to believe he could deliver, even though all the evidence suggested he could not. When we bought New Labour, in other words, we knew we were buying politics-lite, a product with far more style than substance; we let them sell it to us, because the world of image, advertising and spin - of insubstantial products sold on inflated claims of effectiveness - is increasingly the world in which we live, and in which we feel comfortable.

By the same token, I find it hard to accept that many people are truly shocked by the possibility that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction may not have existed after all. From the outset of the Iraq crisis, it was fairly clear that the administration hawks in Washington had decided for their own reasons to eliminate Saddam and his regime; the question for Tony Blair was whether to go along with them, or to join other European leaders in raising the flag of opposition. He made his call; and everything after that always had the flavour of hasty post-hoc rationalisation, as anti-war protestors were not slow to point out.

But the majority who did not protest signalled once again that they were willing to play along; not exactly to believe that Saddam represented a real and present threat to the UK, but to accept both Tony Blair’s decision and his need to provide rationalisations for it.

Perhaps the secret of Tony Blair’s long career as Prime Minister, in other words, is simply this: that his ambivalences and self-deceptions - as a rich guy who portrays himself as humble and ordinary, or as a Mr Nice Guy who nonetheless feels impelled to collude with the wealthy against the weak - often mirror our own; so much so that we are happy to see him carry the public burden of those embarrassing ambiguities, and to deny any responsibility for them ourselves.

In the end, though, we have to face the truth that this impulse of adulation and idealisation of a leader, followed by rejection and denial of that same figure, is neither a mature nor a democratic one. The raising up and tearing-apart of hero-figures is primitive mob behaviour, recognised as such since biblical times; our increasing attraction towards "non-political" hero-figures, coupled with the tabloid fantasy that these chaps could sort out our problems with a snap of the fingers, is the stuff of which military coups and dictatorships are made; and our refusal to take responsibility for our own electoral choices is more like the behaviour of sulky teenage children than of adult citizens in a working democracy.

Heaven knows, active citizenship is not easy to achieve in the world we have made, where the business of getting and spending can easily devour all our days.

But unless we begin to share in the business of political decision-making, we will never acquire either a feeling for its complexity, or the ability to hold to account those politicians who seriously fail in their responsibilities.

And unless we take some power for ourselves, we will never grow out of that Cinderella fantasy that some great leader - some blue-eyed boy or girl in an open-necked shirt - is going to come along and save us from our own worst instincts. Surrounded by unsmiling faces in Basra, Tony Blair looked like nothing so much as an unhappy participant in I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, ready to press the panic-button. But when the chips are down, the Prime Minister is not a celebrity, to be pushed in or out of the public eye as we grow tired of his face. He is a political leader, whose decisions can make or break lives.

And insofar as he draws his power to make those decisions from us, we need to recognise him as our creature; perhaps even, in a sense, as part of ourselves.