Blair will leave no small legacy

AS Tony Blair approached his tenth anniversary in office his ambition was to secure a place in history. And he's certainly done that by being the first serving Prime Minister to be interviewed in a criminal investigation whilst in office.

It's a legacy, but not quite the one he had in mind on that glorious May morning in 1997 when it seemed to everyone that things really could get better.

In what has been a momentous political year, Mr Blair's troubles have mounted.

While it was Charles Kennedy's drink problem that dominated January, from February onwards it was Mr Blair's own problems that set the news agenda.

And while veteran Scottish Lib Dem Sir Menzies Campbell took the party leadership and new Tory leader David Cameron sneaked quietly up behind him, the Prime Minister found himself in deeper trouble over secret loans for lordships, growing problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his deputy John Prescott turning from a political into a personal disaster with the revelation of his affair with Diary Secretary Tracey Temple.

May saw Labour losing heavily in local council elections after Home Secretary Charles Clarke admitted that more than 1000 convicted foreign criminals including murderers, rapists and drug smugglers had been let free rather than deported.

A dramatic Cabinet reshuffle appeared to make little difference as discontent over his leadership mounted.

The summer holiday brought little relief although Mr Clarke's successor John Reid did make a good showing both domestically and internationally over the transatlantic plane bombing conspiracy.

But September saw an attempted coup by Gordon Brown's supporters to get rid of Mr Blair which forced him into finally agreeing with his Chancellor and long term rival some sort of departure timetable to which he would have to stick.

Desperate efforts by the Prime Minister's inner circle - if not the man himself - to find an alternative to Mr Brown as the next Labour leader and prime minister - failed. And finally even he was forced to endorse his Chancellor as his heir.

But despite all the problems, Mr Blair can look back on ten years of achievement. He was the first Labour leader since Harold Wilson - another master of spin, political fixing and half truths - to actually oust the Tories from government.

Indeed in turning round 18 years of Tory misrule - unlike pipe puffing Harold's 13 - he achieved even more.

In doing so Mr Blair actually persuaded the middle classes, and in particular those elusive C1s who had done well post-war under both Labour and Tories - that their home was with the workers' party.

Not just winning one landslide but three thumping majorities in succession made him unique among Labour leaders.

And he managed to be a confidante of successive US Presidents.

His doctrine of the Western world intervening to prevent blood baths elsewhere appeared to be adopted worldwide with successful missions in Sierra Leone and the Balkans.

But even as he rode high in the opinion polls, the seeds of Mr Blair's destruction had already been sown.

His obsession with public relations and managing the news agenda had become more and more characterised as a man not afraid to be shifty and tell fibs rather than fulfil his promises to be "a regular guy" and "whiter than white".

A combination of his close links to US President George W Bush and his liking for foreign adventures led him into ill-judged interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq which have come back to haunt him. Mr Blair's enthusiastic embrace of Mr Bush's "war on terror" has, whatever he says, made Britain a target for Islamic suicide bombers and caused community unrest at home.

And his desire to sever the financial and political link between Labour and the trade unions led directly to the "cash for honours" scandal. The man who once put his finger on the pulse of the nation by describing the recently deceased Diana Spencer as the "people's princess" was reduced to hiding behind Lord Steven's report into her death on the day he was finally interviewed by Scotland Yard.

As a smokescreen it clearly failed to work and only highlighted Mr Blair's increasingly clear shortcomings.

For a man who has seen off four Tory leaders and won three elections and been in power in No 10 for nearly a decade, this is a pretty poor inheritance to leave to his successor.

Almost like a Shakespearean tragic hero Mr Blair's personal flaws have overshadowed his political achievements.

And like Mr Clinton's successor as Democrat presidential candidate, Mr Brown is desperate to disassociate himself from his one-time ally as fast as possible. The Blair years are a clear indication that the late Enoch Powell was right when he said that "all political careers end in failure".

But not many are quite so meteoric as Mr Blair's rise into the Westminster sky and sudden fall to Earth like a disintegrating asteroid.

He must hope that when the history books are finally written, they will treat him better than the newspapers do now if not as well as the media once did. But the odds are that as the academics look back they will see a man who promised so much and achieved so little.

Whether or not he ends up being prosecuted over cash for honours, being interviewed by the police as the first man in Downing Street to suffer such an indignity will be one part of his legacy.

And the other - unless something dramatic happens in the next few years - will be the ill-judged invasion of Iraq, backed by a "dodgy dossier" on Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction, that cost so many British, American and Commonwealth lives.