Despite the world-historical balls-up the Iraq adventure turned out to be, I still have a soft spot for Tony Blair. Perhaps it’s the Gorbachev effect–certain politicians–Bill Clinton was another–are far more appreciated abroad than at home (where they are usually reviled.) And maybe being exposed throughout Blair’s term to the verbal car-crashes that occurred whenever his Irish homologue, Bertie Ahern, went off-script has made me unduly awed by the ability to deliver rhetorical nuggets smoothly.

That oratorical gift was on display today during the penultimate chapter in Blair’s very long goodbye to the electorate. The speech announcing the date of Blair’s actual departure (still more than a month away) was a masterclass in how to get one’s oar in first during the messy process of establishing a statesman’s “legacy.” It dodged the Iraq issue like a matador, but I couldn’t help thinking Blair went a bit over the top when describing the “transformations” that have occurred over the last ten years. While he implored his audience to “…go back to 1997. Think back. No, really, think back. Think about your own living standards then in May 1997 and now” you might forgiven questioning how grim things really were back in the benighted days of the late 1990s, when some people didn’t even have dial-up Internet access. Blair seemed to be portraying himself as some kind of latter-day Adenauer, finding the country in smoking ruins and leaving it a a land of milk and honey.

If Blair fails to join historians’ first rank of world leaders it is perhaps the country he started leading in 1997 wasn’t actually in that much trouble, was already affluent. The crises New Labour confronted over the next decade–Iraq comes to mind again–were largely self-made. Yet if the general attitude to Blair’s political passing is characterised by apathy rather than jubilation or recrimination, it is chiefly because the conflicts in the Middle East–Blair’s supposed LBJ-style scar–directly affect a vanishingly small sliver of the British population.