So how was it for you? Think back a decade and ask yourself how different life is now. Are you better off? Is your house worth more? Do you have a good job? Does your children’s school still have a leaky roof? Is your father stuck on an 18-month waiting list for an operation? Are there no nursery places for your toddler?

If your answers were “yes, yes, yes, no, no, no”, you might conclude that the Blair legacy was pretty solid. There are millions of people whose lives have been improved in the past decade in many small ways. They may not credit the Government for the fact that they now earn a decent minimum wage or that their child has a place at a SureStart centre. They may have forgotten the old winter crises in the NHS (when was the last one?) or the horror stories of grannies lying on trolleys. They may not realise that the tax credits that boost their income are a deliberate Labour policy rather than a Revenue & Customs contrivance. And they may not appreciate that ten years of continuous economic growth is almost unprecedented.

For many of the successes, there is a failure, often the flip side of the same coin. Your house is worth a mint but your grown-up children can’t afford even a small flat. Your local school is new but discipline is so poor that pupils spray graffiti all over it. Waiting lists have virtually vanished but we now complain about cleanliness instead. More people can afford a car and more are in work, so the roads and railways are clogged.

Then there are the failures that are relative, not absolute. Hundreds of thousands of children have been lifted out of poverty, but not as many as ministers hoped. Teenage pregnancies have fallen but are still higher than in most of our European neighbours. Crime is down but violent crime is up. Exam results are improving but those in other countries are improving faster still.

Blair casts himself as EU president candidate

Speaking on French TV, Tony Blair sang the praises of the EU and sketched his agenda for its future, all in fluent French

Multimedia

• The Blair years: video, pictures and analysis

• Interactive Blair Timeline

• BlairTube

BACKGROUND

• The past decade a disaster?

• All about Iraq? Don’t you believe it

• I’ll give Blair six and a half out of ten

Multimedia

• Blair fashion gallery

• Cherie Blair picture gallery

• Brookes on Blair

Related Internet Links

• Competition: what should Blair name his memoirs?

• Comment Central: more articles and debate on the Blair legacy

• The five Americans who have changed Tony Blair

There are slam-dunk tangible achievements, such as peace in Northern Ireland.

Who would have thought, ten years ago, that such a thing was even possible? The conflict seemed as intractable as the Middle East, and ministers were sent to serve there as a penance. Blair put an immense amount of time, energy and patience into that, and deserves history’s pat on his shoulder.

The introduction of tuition fees was highly controversial (not least with Gordon Brown) but Blair put his premiership on the line for it, and now 77 per cent of voters approve. What is more, three of the world’s top ten universities are in this country (all the others are American), and the ability to charge fees will help them to stay there.

Other achievements are more nebulous but no less important. Can you remember, for instance, how uptight and strait-laced Britain felt under John Major? We seemed trapped in a 1950s, Dralon vision of the world in which homosexuality was wicked, working mothers only marginally less so, and Shirley Bassey was the epitome of cool.

Now Britain is seen the world over as modern, vibrant and tolerant. Civil partnerships came in with barely a murmur and gay men get into trouble only if they commit perjury about finding a boyfriend from an escort agency (and had Lord Browne of Madingley done the same with a woman, he would have been equally discredited). Meanwhile, the Leader of the Lords is a black woman and hardly anyone has even noticed. Can you imagine that happening under the Major Administration? Britain has really come on in a decade.

And yet . . . Iraq will be seen as a giant blot on Blair’s record, to some people all that matters. He believed that there were weapons of mass destruction there, but he should have put the intelligence under far more intense scrutiny. As the Butler report showed all too devastastingly, the sources were at best dubious. The trouble was, the intelligence services had failed to predict the Falklands conflict, 9/11 and Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. That they overcompensated when it came to WMD was understandable and disastrous in equal measure.

For me, Blair’s worst sin has been to make the entire political class seem deceitful, and so to erode people’s trust in the political process. Before 1997 the Tories were seen as uniquely sleazy, and Labour promised a fresh start. After Ecclestone, Mittal, cash-for-peerages and a habitual economy with the truth, voters began to believe that “they’re all the same”. From there it is but a short step to political disengagement.

This should not have happened. It is entirely Blair’s fault that it did. He was far too careless with his fundraising and his favours, and he allowed his distaste for the whole process to cloud his judgment.

All premierships, though, are a mixture of successes and failures, and my tally suggests that Blair will score better than average when the historians come to evaluate him. Worse than Churchill, Attlee and Thatcher, perhaps, but certainly better than Major, Callaghan, Eden, Douglas-Home, Heath and Wilson.

Tony Blair the political equivalent of Harold Macmillan? That seems about right. This Prime Minister deserves a respectable six-and-a-half out of ten for achievement. It could have been a lot worse. maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk

Lost cause

One Labour minister told me that he was really quite encouraged by the mood he met on the doorsteps while out canvassing for the local elections last week. “They’re not angry with us,” he told me cheerfully.

I have bad news for him. When voters are angry, they are still prepared to engage. They want to vent their rage but they may be willing, having let it all out, to be persuaded that the party they normally support is listening and changing.

As John Major’s Conservatives discovered during the dog years of 1992 to 1997, the most unpromising voters are those who are no longer angry but merely withdrawn. The chances are that they have already decided to desert you and support another party.

If canvassers meet with a perfectly polite “no” on the doorstep, that’s when they are in trouble.

Splitting mad

Yesterday marked the first day of the new Ministry of Justice, half of the old Home Office. The Guardian also reported yesterday that Tony Blair toyed with splitting the Treasury into two after the 2005 election.

In the past ten years we have had endless reorganisations of departments, with more time, money and energy spent on renaming offices and reshuffling officials than on delivering whatever it is that the new department is supposed to do.

Now there are rumours that Brown, too, wants to make his mark by splitting up some departments and beefing up others. Is there any evidence that voters care a jot about this? And is there any evidence that the business of government is improved by it?

I fear not.

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden