No Golden Legacy

I suppose I’m not really the right person to be writing this, because I never liked the bloke anyway, but over the last week I think we have seen the way Tony Blair will be remembered by history.
Those who did like him will no doubt still be hoping that he will be the man who rescued us from nearly two decades of dark Tory history. The man who chucked out the ‘no such thing as society’ government and shuffled in the era of ‘things can only get better’. They will want him to be remembered for introducing the first national minimum wage in this country, for pouring billions of much needed money into rebuilding the damp, draughty Victorian, or decaying prefabricated post-war school buildings we had inherited from the Tories. For dramatically cutting waiting lists in the NHS, the new hospitals, the additional doctors and nurses in the system. They will also remember the painstaking building of coalitions for an uneasy peace in the North of Ireland to replace the killing and bloodshed of three decades and more. And of course, those 3 landslide victories that once threatened to wipe the Tories off the map forever.
For his enemies the cash for peerages, reliance on targets over outcomes and the spin over substance style of government will feature highly. But nothing, it seems, will dominate Blair’s legacy like the decision to tie himself to the coattails of one of the most ridiculous and despised US Presidents in history. It doesn’t matter that over 400 Members of Parliament supported his invasion of Iraq without a second UN resolution, (including all but a handful of Tories, although they won’t be grilled on their motives by Chilcot) nor that the media joined in the bloodlust and the orgy of congratulations as ‘shock and awe’ devastated Baghdad. They can move onwards.
But not Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. When historians look back on his legacy, long after John Chilcot and the rest of us are pushing up daisies, he will not be fondly remembered as he hoped for liberating the world from a despot. His legacy will lie in the sort of newspaper headlines we have seen over the last week.