The beginning of a long goodbye.

Tony Blair

After nearly 10 years as prime minister, Tony Blair is “going, going”—though still “not quite gone,” said the London Guardian in an editorial. Blair bid farewell to Labor at the party congress in Manchester last week with one of his most stirring and entertaining speeches. Alternately proud of his accomplishments and wistful to be leaving, the premier was funny and charming. Labor will miss him, not least for his rhetorical gifts. When he finished his moving address, the standing ovation lasted a cheering, stamping seven minutes.

Some of that applause sprang from guilt, said John Rentoul in the London Independent. Labor delegates knew that Blair had been “forced out.” Over the past six weeks, an increasingly power-hungry Chancellor Gordon Brown mounted a coup, rallying enough of the party against Blair that the beleaguered prime minister finally promised to leave office within a year. At the end, then, the party faithful were “sorry for him, and embarrassed by their part in his downfall.” And Blair played them as only he could. “Somehow he managed to turn the bittersweet occasion of his premature bundling toward the exit into a master class in how to deliver not just a speech but a political message.”

Those Labor “dinosaurs” must feel pretty stupid now, said George Pascoe-Watson in the London Sun. Blair embodied the entire project of remaking the largely powerless party of trade-unionists and leftists as New Labor—a highly popular, centrist coalition devoted to fiscal restraint, pragmatism, and social idealism. Yet “they’re forcing him out through spite and petty-minded selfishness.” It won’t be long until the 2007 election, when Brown will lose to the likable Conservative leader David Cameron. Then Labor delegates will “rue the day they mounted their coup.”

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Polly Toynbee

Guardian