Iraq Will Be His Legacy

It's time to rummage through the archive: three major anniversaries are looming. Monday will mark 25 years since Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. Stand by for a slew of retrospectives and pre-death obituaries, telling the story of a political earthquake.

If you're like me, you'll study the old footage closely. Not so much as a reminder of how the blonde, self-styled housewife looked and sounded back in 1979. Instead, you'll be peering over her shoulder at the street scene behind: the shops, the cars, the haircuts.

For the shock, fresh each time you feel it, is the realisation that 1970s Britain was a different country. There was something greyly uniform, even vaguely Soviet, about the British high street - a drab shabbiness that infected not just public buildings, but even shop fronts and street signs.

The subliminal message is that Thatcher changed all that. Her legacy is not to be measured merely in parliamentary acts and economic stats; her impact was on the very fabric of British life. Whether you call it privatisation or liberalisation, she cracked the economy wide open: where once the landscape was dominated by vast, state-run industries now there is a cacophony of noisy, brash commerce. Perhaps this was the result of deep, global economic forces that would have reshaped the industrialised world no matter who was in No 10. But it's easier to see all this as Thatcher's work: so that now when you spot a Transco, rather than British Gas, van at the traffic lights, or buy a phone in a shop rather than ordering one from the Post Office, you imagine yourself to be gazing at Thatcher's legacy.

By chance, Labour also marks two key anniversaries next month: John Smith died in 1994, and on Saturday it will be seven years since the fine May day when Tony Blair won a landslide and hailed a "new dawn". Seven years is a totemic, almost Biblical milestone to reach; it is also a longer premiership than most. So it's fair to ask what legacy these years will leave behind. When the TV viewers of the future look back on the Blair era - gasping at the pictures of women in midriff tops and men with their hair so carefully messed-up, all of them texting each other furiously - what will they decide was the Blair legacy?

Few will offer the laundry list hard-wired into the brain of every Labour minister: minimum wage, New Deal for the young unemployed, nearly a million children lifted out of poverty, long years of economic stability exemplified by low unemployment, inflation and interest rates. Those numbers matter, but they don't quite amount to a legacy: as Bill Clinton discovered in the US after presiding over eight good years of growth, calm prosperity alone does not leave much of a footprint in the cultural sand.

Institutions are more useful for those in the legacy business. The 1945 government could point to the NHS as a tangible new creation. When Harold Wilson was asked what he had done with his eight years of power, he famously paused for an age before finally remembering the Open University. On that measure, Blair will be able to rattle off the Scottish parliament, Welsh assembly and London mayoralty. Proudest of all, he could cite the Good Friday agreement for Northern Ireland, bagging, however imperfectly, the prize which eluded so many of his predecessors.

But these still feel like individual items rather than the shaping of an era. For that bigger legacy, Downing Street talks politically. First, say the PM's people, Blair has transformed Labour's destiny. Once deemed unfit to govern, the party is today setting political records - enjoying an opinion poll lead even now, after 84 months in office.

Second, and more enduringly, they say these last seven years have changed the terms of trade of British politics. Thanks to Blair, a nakedly Thatcherite conservative could no longer get elected. "At the very least, they would have to pretend to care about public services," says one paid-up loyalist. Blair has shifted the entire political centre of gravity leftward, he says, so that the future contest will essentially pit social democrats against a British version of Europe's Christian democrats, with both sharing the same core assumptions: "Blair's legacy will be to have converted Britain into a permanently social democratic country."

That is not to be dismissed; along with the laundry list, it is a fairly substantial achievement. And yet I somehow doubt the historians of the future will be so kind. For one thing, they will point to all that Labour and its supporters hoped to achieve. The goal on public services was not merely that all politicians would have to pay lip service to funding them; the hope was to elevate them to world-class standards. Schools and hospitals are clearly improving (though voters continue to tell pollsters that while, say, their local clinic is a marvel, the NHS itself is going to hell - a disconnect that maddens Downing Street). But these services are not yet the gleaming, state-of-the-art services of Labour's 1997 dreams. Perhaps those goals were unrealistic; perhaps such a turnaround would take a generation rather than seven years. But as it stands, Blair's legacy is still partial: a noble aim rather than a job done.

Constitutional reform, the most concrete part of the Blair record, is also incomplete. The future will admire the long-overdue devolution of power to Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast and London - but they will shake their heads in disbelief that a government with such colossal majorities could not fix, once and for all, the archaism of an undemocratic second chamber. After a century of paralysis, a great reforming government should surely have been able to sort that out.

But it is Blair's international record which will undo him - even, perhaps, overshadow everything else he has achieved. It is odd, given that the young Blair who started to sweep Britain off its feet 10 years ago barely spoke about foreign policy - talking only of his burning domestic ambitions - yet it is his global adventures that are most likely to be remembered.

Generous analysts may praise his liberal interventionism in Kosovo and Sierra Leone; others will lament his failure (so far at any rate) to resolve Britain's ambivalence towards Europe, indefinitely postponing the key decision on the single currency. But they will be scathing about the Gulf war of 2003. Just as Suez is forever tied to the name of Anthony Eden, so future generations will examine Tony Blair and find Iraq engraved on his heart.

They will side with the 52 former ambassadors who wrote this week's damning open letter to the PM, wondering how a man so full of promise and loaded with political capital could have blown it on support for a rogue US administration. This was never part of the Blair project; it appeared on no pledge card. Yet support for Bush and his new doctrine of war is all but defining Blair, now and for the future. This is not the legacy he wanted, but it is the one he looks fated to bequeath. And he doesn't have another seven years to put it right.