The spell is broken: in the post-Blair world, we might ask: what did he ever do?

THERE was a certain pathos about the last days of Tony Blair's premiership. A sort of Grand Tour of Statesmanship--a visit to Africa, a swansong at the White House, one last Euro-Summit committing Britain to further loss of sovereignty--had been carefully timed and set up. An official memo leaked last year had sketched the emotional atmosphere to be created at and by these events. Its theme would be that a great star was making his exit, leaving the audience still wanting more.

On the day itself the media did their best to make the constitutional transfer of power from one prime minister to another seem a unique historical event. Blair left Downing Street for the last time as PM to applause, his departure only slightly marred by the report that police had interviewed him for the third time in the "Cash for Peerages" scandal a few days before. He received tributes from opponents and an ovation at Prime Minister's Question Time. Because this ran overtime, the BBC cut out the last five minutes and switched to a sports program. It has since apologized for this extraordinary misjudgment. That was the only technical hitch in Blair's long goodbye and it generated sympathy for him.

But the fact is that the audience didn't want more. They had wanted less for some time. And now that Blair has gone, he is hardly missed. It is as if the magician has left the stage, the spell has been broken, and we are left looking at rags that we once mistook for riches. His successor, Gordon Brown, has made a strong start. He has been helped to do so by terrorists who created a mood of national sobriety suited to Brown's stern personality. He has also appointed the former head of the Royal Navy, a formidable old sea salt by all accounts, to knock Britain's security into shape, among a mixed bag of "imaginative" appointments from all parties and none. We are now in a post-Blair world.

This may be a temporary mood--given time, Brown is perfectly capable of making us nostalgic for the Blair premiership--but it is the mood at present. And it raises serious questions, as they say in Scotland Yard, about the personality and political character of Tony Blair.

THE AMERICAN FRIEND

Such questions are unlikely to be asked by Americans who are mystified when they learn of Blair's unpopularity in Britain. The U.S. will miss Blair in an uncomplicated way. He defended the U.S.--both on Iraq and in general--with greater eloquence and forensic skill than any contemporary American politician. He made Prime Minister's Question Time essential watching for the C-SPAN crowd. Like Margaret Thatcher, he's a friend as well as an ally.

Some of Blair's stateside popularity is explained culturally as a result of the debating skills that a politician in the parliamentary tradition naturally acquires. But it is also traceable to Blair's manifest affection for the U.S.

That affection is genuine but also, in part, misinformed. He likes America because it is "modern" and "a young country," just as he gets irritated with Britain because it is mired in tradition, old, and in thrall to the "forces of conservatism." But all sorts of misconceptions are intertwined here. To start with, the U.S. is not a young country in a constitutional sense. In fact it is one of the oldest countries in the world, its constitution dating from 1789--which also saw the start of what was merely the first of five French republics. America considered more broadly is the continuation of British traditions of law and government, in particular the Whig tradition of ordered liberty. Politically speaking, America and Britain are the same age. Admittedly, America is "modern" in the sense of being in the forefront of new products, fashions, and ideas, but that is largely because its ancient constitutional and political traditions have fostered economic freedom, social progress, and technical innovation. Britain lags slightly behind the U.S., but it is still ahead of most of the world in such matters.

Blair's misunderstanding of America is a reflection of his deeper ideological commitment to the ideal of modernity itself. That produced one of the funnier episodes of Blair's first term. According to the well-informed satirical magazine Private Eye, Blair once arranged for a British tabloid to run an article by the Japanese prime minister. This would say nice things about the country and thus, it was hoped, avert any embarrassingly hostile receptions of the kind previous Japanese leaders had experienced in London at the hands of former POWs. To make assurance doubly sure, Alastair Campbell, Blair's press spokesman and Britain's own "Sultan of Spin," wrote a draft hymning the virtues of modern "Cool Britannia" with its supermodels, celebrity chefs, and brutalist fashion designers. When the Japanese received it, the prime minister added important things that had somehow been omitted, praising Britain for its tradition of fair play, cricket, impartial judges in wigs, tolerance and eccentricity, bobbies, the Queen, and in general the "forces of conservatism." The resulting mish-mash duly appeared in the tabloid, whose readers probably saw no contradiction in it.

Nor, in an important sense, is there any contradiction. "Cool Britannia" was successful because the traditions of tolerance, eccentricity, fair play, and the rest allow people to do their own thing, even if it happens to be designing dominatrix uniforms for respectable society ladies to wear at court. Blair did not see things that way. Rising in the Labour party, even in disguise, taught him that tradition was the enemy of the modern. He thought that making Britain a modern society would necessarily involve uprooting tradition and making all things new. And because his personality was uniquely suited to the television age, he was one of the few people who might pull this off. Alas, that is more difficult than it seems.

OUT WITH THE NEW

If, as Dr. Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, "modernization" is the first refuge of the salesman. The salesman does not have to invent his product; by definition he has already got something to sell. All he has to do is to praise it--which, in modern advertising, generally means describing it as "New." Blair's first modernization success was accordingly the invention of "New Labour"--or, as Keith Waterhouse described it with a satirist's insight, "New! Improved! Labour." Tellingly, New Labour has never really advanced beyond a title. Attempts to fill the concept with ideological meaning have been many and various, but no single definition has ever established itself. "Socialism is what[ever] Labour governments do," said Old Labour's Herbert Morrison in the Fifties, responding with irritation to the dogmatist intellectuals of the Left; well, New Labour is whatever Tony Blair does. And while that may be unsatisfactory to political theorists, it suited Blair well enough. It gave him more or less total freedom of action for government.

But that freedom turns out to be a problem too. Traditions restrict the freedom of the statesman, and they have other drawbacks as well, but at least they give their bearer some idea of what to do in any given circumstances. Atradition is a sort of national habit. "We do things this way," it explains to the inquirer, going on to add, "and here are the reasons why." Those reasons may be false or questionable, but they are at least a start. The inheritor of a tradition knows roughly what direction to take. An advocate of "modernization" pure and simple is looking to the future for advice. Because the future is dumb, being still in the womb, the modernizer has to make things up as he goes along. Thus, he throws out ideas, initiatives, and solutions with a kind of abandon to see which of these wonderful new things will actually work in practice. And if one doesn't work, hey, no problem, plenty more where that came from, namely the back of his mind.

That sounds unfair and is probably an exaggeration, but look at some key episodes in Blair's prime-ministerial career. Take, for instance, his decision to pour money into the National Health Service. That decision was made by Blair--not then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown, who was annoyed that his budgetary decisions had been preempted by a prime-ministerial whim--on a television program about the latest crisis in health care.

By an interesting coincidence, Mrs. Thatcher had to appear on a television program in the midst of an earlier health-care crisis during her premiership. Blair had allegedly been thinking of public-sector reform for some time; Thatcher had confessedly not intended to tackle health-service reform until her next term; both made decisions on the hoof. Blair announced a massive transfer of several percent of British GDP into health--expenditure on the NHS has doubled in real terms since then--without requiring any reforms in return.

Thatcher, in contrast, announced the establishment of a ministerial committee to reform and improve the NHS. That committee met for a year and, in addition to increasing health spending, reorganized the NHS around the idea of an "internal market" that was itself in the tradition of economic liberalism started by Adam Smith. The reorganization, like the idea of an "internal market" itself, was an improvement but an imperfect one. By such tests as how many more patients were treated, or how many more operations performed, however, Thatcher's reform greatly outperformed Blair's in getting improvements commensurate with the extra spending.

The comparison, alas, does not end there. On coming to power in 1997, Blair abolished the semi-independent foundation hospitals that were a key part of the Thatcher reforms. That produced the crisis to which he responded with massive extra spending. Finally, when it was clear that simply spending more had not delivered the goods, Blair reintroduced the foundation hospitals and a similar system of schools) that had been abolished. That sort of thing gives a bad name to the practice of following one bright idea with another.

MUDDLING THROUGH

The longer his administration lasted, the more Blair became known for eye-catching initiatives that either failed, or produced unwelcome results, or simply never went anywhere. Blair's constitutional reforms--devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales, House of Lords reform, and the Human Rights Act granting judges the power to annul laws--brought about such unintended consequences as the rise of Scottish nationalism, a second chamber dependent on prime-ministerial patronage, and the release of known terrorists onto the streets of London. The subway bombings similarly elicited from him a whole raft of anti-terrorist proposals that were forgotten as soon as he mentioned them.

And even some of Blair's achievements dissolve on close examination. Take the economy. Blair did respect the achievements of the previous Tory government in creating efficient labor and financial markets and in setting a stable macroeconomic framework for the economy. He saw these, not incorrectly, as modernizing measures. Brown and he promised--and kept their promise--to make their administration live within the budgetary plans left by the Tories for their first term. With the exception of Brown's making the Bank of England independent, however, they embarked on few significant economic reforms. On the economy, indeed, Blair fails his own test of modernization, for an odd reason: He gave virtual control of economic and domestic policy to Brown, who frustrated many of the economic aims that Blair had. In addition, seeking to redistribute income by manipulating taxes and regulations, Brown has driven Britain's public spending to 45.3 percent of GDP--almost 5 percent above the OECD average. Not coincidentally, according to Allister Heath in The (London) Spectator, all the main English-speaking countries have grown faster than Britain since 1997. It is only against Europe that Britain's economic performance under Blair looks good.

Blair lacked the administrative stamina--a combination of dedication, hard work, and fortitude--that enabled Thatcher to achieve so much, driving her reforms through the bureaucratic committees and corridors of power. He behaved as Truman predicted Eisenhower, with his military experience, would behave: He gave orders and was annoyed to discover that they hadn't been carried out. Unlike Eisenhower, however, he then moved on to the next topic and the next bright idea. The result was that he won three elections but failed to achieve the domestic reforms he had set himself. In the light of Blair's domestic record, the public sense that he has disappeared leaving nothing behind him is understandable. He wasn't really there in the first place.

All of which means that his legacy is unduly dependent on foreign policy--or, in simple terms, Iraq and Europe. On the former, his reputation will depend on future events over which he has no control and on past events over which he had little control. For it seems that though President Bush listened to his close friend and ally over such matters as the second resolution in the U.N., and U.S. policy in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Blair was pretty much cut out of the decision-making process over the occupation of Iraq. We have no reason to believe that he would have made very brilliant or even merely different decisions. Still, as the junior partner in an expedition that now looks increasingly doomed, Blair was apparently dragged along paths not of his own choosing. He now has little hope of retrieving his reputation--unless, again for reasons beyond his control, he is saved by a successful democratic movement in Iraq (and perhaps Lebanon) that in 20 years traces back its success to Blair's part in the intervention. But the cost of this hypothetical gain has been the growth of serious anti-Americanism in Britain and the weakening of the Anglo-American special relationship. These developments were obviously not pursued by Blair, but they were partly caused and certainly aggravated by his failure to explain the Iraq War to the British in terms of national interest.

That leaves Europe--and Europe explains Blair's last diplomatic foray at Brussels in committing Britain to support a European constitution (lightly disguised as a treaty so that he and Brown could escape from their manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on a constitution). Blair's commitment to European unification was perhaps the most passionate and the least successful of his modernizing passions. He identified the European Union with modernity, perhaps even more than he did America, even though it is actually a rather old-fashioned centralized and bureaucratic structure--"yesterday's vision of the future" as Thatcher has put it. His practical frustrations and disappointments in Europe--he was once heard on an open mike waxing sarcastic on "the colleagues"--never dented his general enthusiasm for the European project. He feels obscurely guilty for failing to take Britain into Europe (though the Eurozone is, economically, doing worse than Britain). He compensated for this failure by signing on to a common European defense structure--something arguably much more destructive of U.K. sovereignty.

About this loss of sovereignty, he seems to feel no particular disquiet. And why should he? After all, Britain is an old country and Europe a modern organization. It remains to be seen, however, if the British have been sufficiently modernized to surrender their identity without a fight.

Blair made conventional references to the British as the finest people in the world, etc., in his final speeches. The remarks may have been sincere, but they sounded false and contrived. They did not fit comfortably alongside known Blairite preoccupations. Blair is now a senior peace envoy to the Middle East. In the Mideast peace process, he will certainly be in his element--a blend of internationalism and fantasy. He won't miss Britain, and vice versa.