Twenty years of Tony Blair: totting up the balance sheet | Michael White

Blair's administrations achieved a major shift in the way Britain is run and feels about itself, despite the disfiguring scar of Iraq

Is it only 20 years ago that Tony Blair, that fresh-faced boy and his wife, Cherie, stood before the cameras as the new face of the Labour party? It is, but the early 90s seems far longer away in so many ways, and so does globetrotting, wheeler-dealing Blair. Who he is now and who the rest of us are makes it harder to evaluate his substantial record in office.

That Blair and Gordon Brown, a partnership whether they liked it or (sometimes) didn't, changed a great deal in modern Britain, much of it for the better, can hardly be denied. Yet this is routinely denied on both right and left for reasons that do not help our understanding.

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