You know that first day of autumn chill after a roasting August? The leaves are about to turn and, for the first time in months, you shiver when you get out of bed. “It’s all over,” you think to yourself, not without a touch of melancholy.

That’s how Tony Blair must be feeling now. All the other upsets and crises that have beset him over the past nine years have been relatively ephemeral. He has always had a hunch that he would pull through and, sure enough, the sun has come out again afterwards. But this past week definitively marked the beginning of the end.

His departure is now out of his control. Even if he wanted to stay on until autumn 2008 (which used to be his preferred date) he is no longer able to. “It’s like he’s being sucked down by a whirlpool,” said a friend last week, “and it’s hard to know how to climb out of it.”

Blair’s only hope of departing with dignity is to choose his own time to name his date. But the date will have to be sometime next year. He no longer has the support of his MPs to stay on any longer.

Nonetheless, some historical comparisons have been made over the past week or so that really don’t hold water. Take Margaret Thatcher’s demise in November 1990, for instance.

Here was a Prime Minister who was desperately unpopular: even more than Blair is now. She looked more than slightly deranged, and she was determined to enact a policy — the poll tax — that was hated by almost all voters, including many in her party and Government.

Earlier that year the poll tax had brought 200,000 people on to the streets of London in protest, and the demo turned into a full-scale riot. The atmosphere that year was tense and really quite scary, as if civil disorder could break out at any moment.

Like Blair, Thatcher made the mistake of demoting her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, to Leader of the House. Unlike Blair, though, she also lost her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson. And unlike him she reshuffled her Cabinet to include many ministers, such as Chris Patten, who felt that they owed little loyalty to her.

But the biggest difference was the national feeling that getting rid of her would change everything. The hated poll tax would go and a much more popular and consensual Prime Minister would take her place. Polls taken at the time of the leadership contest showed that, if Michael Heseltine replaced her, the Conservatives would move from 12 points behind Labour to eight points ahead.

Of course, Heseltine didn’t replace her. But John Major’s victory led to a Tory lead of five points within a couple of months of her going. By then, 61 per cent of the public expressed satisfaction with his performance, compared with just 25 per cent for Thatcher before her downfall.

Would getting rid of Blair transform Labour’s fortunes, too? It doesn’t look like it. The only really unpopular policy with which he is personally associated is Iraq, but voters had a chance to punish him for that at the last election and he still won. Anyway, a change of leader won’t change the policy on Iraq now.

As for popularity, our Populus poll this week showed that, if anything, Gordon Brown is even less liked than Blair. With the current party leaders, the Tories lead Labour by 38 per cent to 30 per cent. With Brown instead of Blair, the Conservative lead widens from eight to ten points.

The other historical comparison widely bandied about is between the trio of horrors — foreign prisoners, Prescott lechery and Hewitt barracking — that coincided on one day last month, and Major’s Black Wednesday, in which Britain had to pull out of the exchange-rate mechanism. In fact, the day of the week is almost the only thing that the two events have in common.

Sure, the triple whammy was embarrassing and damaging. But none of those scandals will hurt ordinary people’s lives as badly as the crippling interest rate rises suffered in 1992. Remember negative equity? Remember the recession? Remember the cost of mortgages? Almost everybody suffered then. Not many of us are likely to be attacked on the street this week by an undeported foreign ex-convict.

So while things are certainly pretty terrible for Blair, and may get even worse if the cash-for-peerages scandal deepens, he is not yet in as bad a state as Thatcher in 1990 or Major in 1992. For the moment, at least, he is facing the nippy winds of autumn, not the icy blasts of winter.

Pro-Test founder deserves a medal

On Newsnight on Tuesday evening, an articulate Oxford student, Iain Simpson, made a forceful case against an animal rights prostester who wants to post the private addresses of shareholders in GlaxoSmithKline on the internet, presumably so that dog mess can be put through their letterboxes.

Simpson is spokesman for Pro-Test, the admirable organisation set up recently to defend medical research against the intimidatory techniques of the animal rights campaigners. Its founder, Laurie Pycroft, is just 16.

These young people are not only principled and idealistic; they are also extraordinarily brave. Pycroft has received death threats and the police have persuaded his family to install a panic button at their house.

Pycroft is already the youngest person to speak at the Oxford Union (his side persuaded the audience to support animal testing by 225 to 106 votes). Can we please now make him the youngest person on an honours list, too?

Celtic poison

There was another outbreak of E. coli, the vicious food poisoning bug, in a Scottish nursery this week. It rang a bell. Sure enough, looking back through the records I found that over the past 18 months, all the E. coli outbreaks reported by The Times have been in either Scotland or Wales.

This is a bit odd, isn’t it? Are Celtic culinary habits any different from those of the English? Any theories welcome.

maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk

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