Matthew Norman: Blair let me down

The clue was there from the start, when he strolled along Downing Street with Cherie that blazing Friday bathing in beatific grins of worshippers we were invited to believe were members of the general public.

Only, of course, they weren't. They were Labour Party workers and shadow ministerial aides. That this supposedly spontaneous outpouring of worship for the new Prime Minister proved to be a pre-planned media event seems a trivial deception by any standards, let alone those Mr Blair would later unleash. But it set the template for his style of government to perfection. The first British leader to grow up in the television age, the first to appreciate the importance of visual imagery in moulding opinion, his paramount concern was always manipulating the media to sustain himself in power. Above all, he understood that perception is far more potent than reality.

Or rather, he half understood. He got the bits about being able to fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. It was the second half of Abraham Lincoln's aphorism he didn't grasp until it was too late. With the unnatural self-belief of the megalomaniac, he assumed that he could fool all of the people all of the time.

Long before Iraq, more clues came and went that the messianic would-be recreator of a young country was in fact a dangerous, charming rogue. In the wake of the Ecclestone business, a nation still metaphorically dancing over the humbling of Michael Portillo chose to suspend disbelief that he wasn't a pretty straight kinda guy after all.

Later, with his attempt to impose Frank Dobson's mayoralty on an unwilling London, the autocratic centralist instinct that would lead to Walter Wolfgang being frogmarched from a conference hall was presented in a gilded display case, but few chose to notice. Some fibs were mildly endearing, as when it was claimed on his behalf that he'd saved from drowning a Danish businessman mildly irked, it transpired, at being dragged from the Indian Ocean during a quiet swim for no apparent reason. Others (the whopper that the House of Lords had rejected the ban on fox hunting) were alarming, not so much for themselves as for the inevitability that they would be instantly exposed.

Was he recklessly blasé about lying, or the classic sociopath who believed his words must be the truth for the simple reason that they came from his mouth? Was he rascal or madman? Was he, perhaps more likely, both?

And yet however transparent the lie - knowing nothing about spending £500,000 on those two Bristol flats, for example; having no involvement in the failed attempt to wangle him a more important role at the Queen Mother's funeral - pliant newspapers continued to indulge him. Time after time when he had was caught at it, leader articles reassured readers that, while the incident was regrettable, the one thing in absolutely no doubt was the Prime Minister's personal integrity.

If his adroit use of human lightning rods (Cherie, Mandelson, Campbell, latterly Lord Levy) to take the heat for him formed one key plank of his survivalist technique, the other was his obeisance to Rupert Murdoch.

He'd done the Faustian pact before coming to office, bartering his political soul at one of those News International pow-wows. In power, he was delighted to cede British policy on Europe to an Australian-American smuggled in through the No 10 back door on rare state visits to give orders on such trifling matters as the holding of a referendum on the EU constitution. He would even attend a Christmas party, late in his career, on the arm of the editor of The Sun.

With the slavering support of the Murdoch press, and with less partisan papers and an ever-nervous BBC lacking the insight or the stomach to tell it straight, who can really blame him for developing the invulnerability complex that was finally to destroy him? Naturally he thought he could get away with the familiar cocktail of lies, half truths and omissions for ever. And but for Iraq, he might well have done so.

The die was cast on 9/11. At the subsequent Labour Party conference, his sense of excitement was palpable as his advisers, their West Wing fantasies out of control, ran around squawking: "This is what we were born for!" Seduced by a congressional standing ovation, his appetite for adrenalin and admiration became barely satiable.

So it was that his trinity of psychological flaws - the pathological craving for attention exhibited since toddlerhood; the monomaniacal certainty in his own wisdom and moral rectitude that precluded him listening to dissenting voices; and that utterly amoral disregard for the facts - combined to entice him into Iraq, and annihilate whatever remained of his reputation for competence, judgment and humanity.

He will leave No 10 with one immense achievement, Northern Ireland, and a sleeping partner's minor share in the economic successes of Gordon Brown. And he leaves in his wake a trail of ruins - a politicised and degraded civil service, overstretched and demoralised armed forces, a cabinet as neutered and toothless as the House of Commons, an education system still churning out the illiterate and innumerate, a fiscally chaotic and mutinous NHS, a transport infrastructure barely worthy of a developing country, and the nagging, nebulous but compelling sense that Britain, while in some important ways more tolerant than 10 years ago, has in others become a greedier and more venal society than when he arrived.

That broiling Friday morning 10 years ago, with that massive parliamentary majority and unparalleled public goodwill, he had the most powerful starting hand dealt to any new prime minister in modern history. The one thing he didn't need to do was bluff. The murderous thing about Tony Blair's nature, and thus his leadership, is that he never knew how to do anything else.

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