Tony Blair’s has got to have been the longest goodbye. So long that well before he finally hands over the prime ministership of Britain to Gordon Brown today, his departure from London’s 10 Downing Street has been planned many, many times over: secretary-general of the United Nations, reassuring replacement for Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank — but perhaps it is the most credible assignment that is most apt. Word abounds that he will now coordinate efforts to find peace in the Middle East, especially in the aftermath of Hamas-Fatah violence in Gaza. The assignment would return Blair to his still unsettled argument with history.

In interviews in his last weeks in office, he has repeated that at the heart of Blairism is ‘liberal interventionism’. That, for most, is longhand for the one issue that currently eclipses all else on his ledger: Iraq. (In his Manchester speech on Sunday, Brown noted that it was the one issue that had most divided the Labour Party and its government.)

In those internationally fractious days of early 2003, Blair held by his eloquence on the need to invade Iraq. And somehow the impression was that, in his conviction in Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States, the feeling that it was the transatlantic alliance that gave his country the capacity to assert its influence, he had been led into the war.

The Blairite narrative differed. By this, his case for intervention in Iraq — that he was doing what he thought was right — had not been manufactured after the Bush administration’s decision. It went back to his friend, Bill Clinton’s administration. In 1999, Blair articulated his “doctrine of international community” in a speech in Chicago. It was part of his effort to persuade Clinton that troops were required on the ground for the NATO effort in Kosovo to be effective.

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