One of Ours

...At the moment the Labour party is between three and four points behind the opposition in the polls, and the trumpeted fact that 46% want Blair to stand down before the next election has obscured the more awkward fact that 54%, apparently, don't want him to...

[...]

...today the talk is of forcing out a leader who has presided over (take a deep breath, a list is coming) two landslide victories, record low unemployment, record investment in public spending and all the other stuff that, I seem to remember, used to be regarded as being important by Labour-minded folk...

[...]

...the excessive dislike of Blair among certain small sections of British society long predates Iraq. A friend of mine recalled for me his attendance at a dinner party in late 1997 when he was taken aback by the venomous contempt for Blair displayed by a gathering of journalists, publishers and academics. And I often noticed the same phenomenon...

...The accomplishments of the government cannot be attributed to him, while its failures can. It's a sort of reverse hero-worship...

It isn't really about ideology. Most of the pathological Blair-bashers I have met are not what is meant by "traditional Labour supporters", in the sense that they are invariably members of the professional middle classes. And almost every dread reform that Blair has enacted has been tried somewhere else in social democratic Europe, no matter how much the previous British form has been fetishised by conservative Labourites.

...Blair will want to bugger off a year or so after (he hopes) winning the election of 2005. This allows a successor to be chosen and to have been PM for at least two or three years before standing [for a general election] again...