Spin, sleaze, and, of course, Iraq, should not blind us to Blair's brilliance, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
He was the outstanding politician of his generation.
He defined himself against his party to make it electable after 18 years in opposition, becoming the first Labour leader in history to win two, then three successive terms in power. And by many popular accounts it would seem the people of Britain are now glad to see the back of him.
The reality is less clear-cut. Some will never forgive him, not least - with his "modernising", Third Way, "big tent" approach to politics - for making Labour look like the natural party of government. Unlike their predecessors, he and chancellor Gordon Brown managed not to make a mess of the economy, instead presiding over steady growth, stable inflation (at least until recently), low unemployment and low interest rates.
The Blair government raised tax by stealth, redistributed income, introduced a minimum wage after 100 years of Labour promises, and lifted 700,000 children out of poverty. It also permitted high levels of immigration, and by general consensus - despite increasing doubts about multiculturalism and fears about lack of integration in the face of the terrorist threat posed by Islamist extremism - has made Britain a better place for ethnic minorities, as well as for disabled people and gay men and women.
Against that the recent BPIX survey found people otherwise thinking the country a less successful, less pleasant, less liberal, less happy place in which to live. Crime has fallen, while one set of conflicting official statistics shows violent street crime rising sharply.
The gap between the richest and poorest in Blair's Britain has grown, while the middle classes have taken the tax hit to finance massively increased spending on health and education. The experience of endlessly reformed schools, hospitals, transport and other public services, meanwhile, falls far short of the promised "world class" standard.
Having vowed that Labour would be "whiter than white", Mr Blair leaves office tainted by a "cash for honours" affair serving as a byword for "sleaze" in an administration forever associated with "spin", the priority of presentation over substance, the inflation of its achievements and the burial of its bad news.
Blair, of course, lost "trust" long ago in the bitter aftermath of an Iraq war that the vast majority are agreed will be his enduring legacy. "Blairaq" screamed the headline over one poll last week proclaiming this truth, while also recording that 61 per cent of voters - and 89 per cent of Labour supporters - still believe that he has been a good prime minister.
And there was something of the old Blair magic evident even yesterday, as Downing Street played his long-awaited resignation statement as tragedy.
Which, for him, it was. Desperate to avoid the Thatcher trap of promising to "go on and on", Blair the brilliant strategist had made the biggest tactical mistake of his political life, calculating to win his third election by promising not to fight a fourth.
From that moment he was inevitably deemed a "lame duck" prime minister, the focal point for all public disappointments and for the internal resentments of a party grown fearful that its biggest electoral asset had now become the obstacle to its future success.
And so the longest farewell in British political history has inevitably been a sorry affair - with yesterday's statement the result of last September's attempted coup, finally wrung from the man who is probably sorriest of all.
It is sobering to reflect that 17 months have passed since David Cameron launched his new Conservative leadership by taunting Mr Blair across the despatch box - "he was the future once".
And when on Wednesday of this week he suggested that, even now, the departing prime minister did not realise "that it's over", the Tory leader was tapping in to a widespread belief that Mr Blair really didn't want, and wasn't ready, to go.
If Enoch Powell's dictum is generally correct that all political careers end in failure (allowing for the apparent exception of Ian Paisley), we can take it that there have been tears inside Number 10. And they will have been all the more bitter at the dawning realisation in the final weeks that the succession will almost certainly pass to the man - Gordon Brown - deeply resented by Cherie Blair for his long-standing and very public impatience to have her husband's job.
It will be presented now as entirely natural that the most successful relationship between a prime minister and chancellor should see Brown succeed, as co-architect and keeper of the New Labour project.
Indeed in this duality Brown has often been cast as prime minister to "President" Blair. Yet Blair has long regretted the extraordinary powers he ceded Brown as the price of his backing when the young Tony, spurred on by Peter Mandelson, decided it was he and not Gordon who should succeed the late John Smith. Brown's reach would famously be felt right across Whitehall, though nowhere would his power be more evident than in his frustration of Blair's ambition to join the euro and put Britain "at the heart of Europe".
The received wisdom will be that the tragedy of this prime minister - who committed British forces more times than any of his predecessors - was to turn his back on Europe in favour of the American alliance and the Bush-led neo-con adventure to seek global and domestic security by spreading democracy through Iraq across the Middle East. But even as American policy shifts, Blair - the man once mocked as a prisoner of focus groups believing in nothing - leaves without an apology for toppling Saddam Hussein.
History may judge that Iraq was indeed "Blair's Suez".
Brown, and Cameron, may hope never to have to make such famous "hard choices". But in choosing America at a time of unprecedented global threat, and insisting on punching above Britain's weight on the world stage, Tony Blair - wrongly depicted as a Tory - may yet come to be seen as having been in the right tradition of British prime ministers.