Suicide is painless, Mr Blair

It brings on many changes

A BBC correspondent reflected this evening on Blair's departure and signaled the mass demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq as a turning point. He cited the way in which the decision to go to war alienated Blair's natural supporters, as the axis upon which our Dark Knight's fortune turned.

Whisper it softly, but it is now acceptable to say how many people attended the demonstrations against the war without a bizarre and unfeasible reference to the Blairite fantasy that the Poll Tax Demo was larger.

Curiously the Blair babes forget how Major accessed the thorny throne. So perhaps do the Brownites, barely distinguishable as they are to all but the blind who of necessity must listen carefully for content and meaning; and for whom it has been a hard, if ultimately rewarding, decade.

The BBC report of course propogated a classic Labour believer's error, or at least a daydream believer's, far more important in fact was Blair's loss of his wider coalition.

The gloves came off. Home Secrataries were no longer safe ... - nor indeed were the domestic servants of their associates.

Now of course this should not distract us from the fact that Paul Dacre is a crazed loony who thinks that Blair damaged his baby, nor that we, the Labour Party's natural supporters, were generally opposed to 'the Iraq intervention' too. Indeed, given our greater knowledge of the Iraqi exile community - and indeed of middle eastern politics in general - this was mostly with good reason too.

But what Iraq tells us, apart from the lessons about imperialism and its all-but Fanonite dis-junction with neo-conservativism in the third world - which we knew anyway, is that Blair was never about the left.

This above all was why he siezed upon the neo-conservative paranoia of 2002 like a debtor meeting an old friend; why he was a master of missed oportunities; why two years of To[n]ry spending plans were Blair's breathing space; and why Gordon will be hard-pushed to escape the sense of guilt by association as the death toll, and indeed the bills, mount.