The Labour Party — which Blair led to three historic, crushing election victories — is now embarrassed by the most successful leader in its history. None of the candidates to succeed Brown have claimed the mantle of Blairism. To do so would invite scorn and mockery.

In fact, Blair Derangement Syndrome is especially strong among the Labour-supporting chattering classes. Reading the Guardian — the house paper for right-thinking, respectable progressives — you’d gain the impression that Blair was a greater villain than Saddam Hussein…

These bouts of outrage confirmed what we already knew: Blair has been exiled from polite and right-thinking discourse in Britain. He, much more than Bush, is beyond the pale; he is the man of whom we do not speak. Bush, the fashionable line insists, was an ignoramus, but Blair should have known better.

But the idea, widely accepted in Britain, that Blair was “Bush’s poodle” could scarcely be more misplaced. If anything, the boot was on the other foot. Blair may have been acutely conscious that London was Washington’s junior partner, but he, not Bush, acted the part of elder statesman. It was Blair whose foreign-policy credentials had been forged by wars in Kosovo and by intervening to stop a particularly nasty civil war in Sierra Leone. It was Blair who decided that he would offer unconditional support to the U.S. president in exchange for the chance to lead Bush through the perilous diplomatic waters of the post-9/11 environment. Blair effectively bought himself private influence — though he had not calculated that its cost would be the appearance of public weakness.