Why Tony Blair has to go

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1881880,00.html

In the end he did play "that last encore" and still managed to leave the crowd wanting more. That was what his Downing Street advisers had hoped for, at least according to the memo setting out the Blair farewell tour, leaked at the start of the month. And yesterday the prime minister pulled it off perfectly. He closed his speech and left the stage, leaving the audience to gape at a stirring video montage, complete with pounding soundtrack, of highlights from the Blair years: the Portillo defeat of May 1 1997, the Good Friday agreement, a third election victory in 2005. To rhythmic applause, he came back out, working the crowd, touching a succession of hands. His aides wanted him to go out like a rock star, and so he did.

Indeed, as he basked in the flashbulbs and ovation, a cheeky thought struck. Tony Blair will never get a better send-off than this. Any other departure - say, a brief announcement to the cameras outside No 10 - would count as a terrible anticlimax by comparison. Yesterday he faced a packed, cheering arena, brandishing placards bellowing their gratitude: "Tony, you made Britain better", even "We love you, yeah, yeah, yeah". So what if they were clearly hand-scribbled by party apparatchiks? The effect won't be matched again.

For all that, there was no appeal for him to stay. Indeed, when he said it was "right to let go", his audience clapped. That's because yesterday Blair also offered a reminder of why he had to leave - and why they will be relieved when he has. It came in the passage about international affairs. Suddenly the applause died as the prime minister announced that terrorism is unconnected to foreign policy, and only enemy propaganda would say otherwise. Blair is one of the very few people left on the planet who still believes this: even the CIA now concedes that the invasion of Iraq has fuelled terrorism rather than curbed it. So when Blair said that a withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan would be "a craven act of surrender", he said it to silence.

Those passages were not the lengthiest section of the speech, but they cast a shadow over the rest. They explain why Tony Blair, for all his sorceror's powers, could not go on and on and on. He said yesterday that the British people would always prefer a wrong decision to no decision at all, that they would forgive a mistake. But that is only partially true. Yes, the public handed Blair another majority in 2005, but it was on a paltry share of the vote. The decision to invade Iraq is a mistake that has hardly been forgiven: instead it engendered a distrust that forced Blair to announce his eventual departure and that lives on to this day.