Better the devil you knew?

Tony Blair won three General Elections as Labour leader. This is a feat without precedent; given the likelihood of a Conservative government occupying most of the 2010s, it's an achievement some of us may not be around for the next time it happens. Indeed, if you follow the gloomy predictions of Fraser Nelson and Ian Martin, Labour may not survive the next decade as a serious party of government, an deliciously amusing prospect. Now more comedy comes from a Telegraph poll feasting on the richly entertaining despair of Gordon Brown, observing:

In fact, the only Labour figure who could significantly narrow the gap with the Tories is the man the party forced out of office last year: Tony Blair. Yet even with Mr Blair as leader, Labour would trail the Conservatives by 32 per cent to 41 per cent.

I do not much care for Tony Blair - a vain, shallow man with a messiah complex whose legacy may be starkly at odds with his own view of himself. But his capacity for charm is incontestable. Eleven years on from the first of his two landslides, a slightly revisionist view has crept in that he was only awarded such a handsome victory because of the revulsion shown for John Major's Tories.

Nonsense. Tony Blair was genuinely popular to point of being beloved, and those who seek to claim otherwise are letting his subsequent failure to live up to his own promise impair their recollection. Even in the midst of the Iraq war, New Labour's growing sense of tarnishment, increasing frustration with the government, Tony Blair remained a winner in 2005. People voted for him time after time.

Historians will mull over this and think "just what the fuck were they doing when they kicked him out for Gordon Brown?" A flawed winner, replaced by a serial election-dodger, a moody, uncommunicative socialist automaton, whose answer to everything is either sulking, hiding, lying or dully churinng out tractor production figures. Or a combination of the three.

And it's not as though there wasn't ample evidence of his unsuitability BEFORE he took office. The superb Political Betting shows quite clearly that he was not the public's favoured option when up against David Cameron. This data will have been known to Labour MPs. And still they crowned him, without a vote, and sent him out to a distrusting and restless public which is beginning to realise it didn't mind that nice Mr Blair so much after all.

Truly, they reap what they sow. And as for Tony, he has kept his counsel well. But you can almost see the old rogue's winsome smile as he surveys the post-Blair Labour party.