From a purely party political point of view, Blair should have gone when no WMD were found in Iraq. Given how unpopular the war was among traditional Labour voters, he was never going to recover from that. Better a quick surgical removal than the slow death the party seems to have committed itself to.

The irony is that the Conservative Party supported the war just as much a Blair did but they’re likely to reap the rewards of the shambles Blair has created.

Maybe that is the case, but that assumes that Blair really wanted to hand over to an heir (but not Brown) after, say, ten years: we’ll never know. On the other hand, every Blairite candiate touted by the media has crashed and burned in some way (Blunkett, Clarke, Straw, Milburn, Johnson, Reid) It’s all too reminiscent of the touted successors to Thatcher who never made it.

In fact, maybe that’s the point: Labour keep obsessing over not making the mistakes that the Tories made re. Thatcher’s demise, that they fail to see that they’ve already made them: viz. the cult of personality re. the leader; the protestations of eternal fealty (see last September’s conference), and the inability to groom a group of potential successors from which the party can choose (and yes, that does include Brown).