It’s time someone put in a word for Tony Blair. And I suppose it had better be me. Do you think he’ll mind that this is being done by someone who worked in Conservative Central Office? You know what, I don’t think he will. I’m pretty certain that deep down, he knows the score.

As Labour’s conference opened in Bournemouth a fortnight, and a political age, ago, I took a phone call from an old friend of mine, a former Labour Cabinet minister. He wanted to tell me off. You Tory modernisers are in trouble, he said, because you liked Blair too much. Now the country has turned against him decisively, and you’ve been beached. Gordon Brown is posing as the anti-Blair, he said, and he has understood the spirit of the times.

Well, this is a pretty common view and it’s obviously one that Mr Brown shares. But I am sorry, I don’t. Rather unfashionably, I believe that the desperate attempt of the Prime Minister to airbrush his old friend out of history is an error. It’s the same error, incidentally, that Al Gore made in his campaign to be President. Using a pair of scissors he neatly cut Bill Clinton out of all their joint photographs, with hilarious consequences.

I’ll start with a point you may regard as quaint. For Mr Brown to make one grudging reference to Tony Blair in his conference speech was spectacularly rude. I used to write speeches for a living and can spot a formulaic, last-minute paragraph a mile off. “Whoops, we forgot to mention Tony, better stick in something when we mention the Middle East.” What a disgrace. This was, after all, the man who led his party out of the wilderness and to three huge election victories. Leaving all politics aside for a second, common courtesy demanded much, much more.

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Now you may wonder why a question of manners has got me so exercised. It’s because I believe in a simple rule. If you see a person you know behave unreasonably to someone else, you can bet your last pound that before long he’ll be behaving like that to you.

This gracelessness was not an isolated incident. Alastair Campbell decided that he had better remove any references from his diary that showed Mr Brown in a bad light. There wasn’t much eraser left on the end of his pencil by the time he had finished rubbing out the tales of tears and tantrums. Mr Brown’s obsessive and unreasonable behaviour towards Mr Blair is seen as history by most people. I see it as a glimpse of the future.

The problem with confining Mr Blair to a single sentence of his conference address was not just that it made Mr Brown look small (at least it did to me, the rest of you can speak for yourself). It’s also that it robbed the new Prime Minister of the ability to make a proper argument, to tell a story about Labour’s period in office and its plans.

He says that he delayed his election (and Ed Balls’s election, credit where credit is due) because he wanted us to see his vision for change. But what is that vision? Change from what? Why do we need change? What has gone wrong in the past? What did they do right? What have they learnt? How on earth can you answer any of these questions without mentioning Tony Blair? Mr Brown’s unfathomable row with his predecessor over who said what to whom over a dish of spaghetti in 1994 reduced his speech to a series of unlinked assertions and has clouded his vision for change.

Now some people will be perplexed by what I’ve written. Hasn’t Mr Brown, without mentioning Mr Blair, really capitulated to him? Hasn’t all the spinning and inviting Margaret Thatcher and courting Tories and seeking eyecatching initiatives just been one long homage to the departed Member for Sedgefield? No. I think that represents a misunderstanding.

Gordon Brown is new Labour to his fingertips and as Prime Minister he has demonstrated that – the restless initiatives, the endless political manoeuvring, the search for a third way out of every policy dilemma and the pitch to Middle England.

But by the time he left office Tony Blair had gone beyond this. He realised that third-way compromises were not enough and that reform of public services were necessary. He had grown tired of thinking solely about political manoeuvres and had, too little and too late, begun to think in terms of arguments and legacies. And (I wonder whether he would admit this?) even become a little bit exasperated with Middle England.

The standard view of Mr Blair was that he was good to begin with and then went off. I am of the opposite view. I think the Blair that left office in 2007 was a much better prime minister than the one that walked into the door ten years earlier. I am sure that would be Mr Blair’s view too. He slowly learnt that he hadn’t done enough to reform public services, for instance, and that he would have to try harder. With the incoming ministers I feel we have landed on a snake and slid all the way back to the beginning of Snakes and Ladders.

I know what a lot of my fellow commentators think, though. Who cares about all that stuff – the electorate are just glad not to put up with all that preening and simpering. The consensus appears to be that Mr Brown’s dull solidity is his great asset. I think this an eccentric judgment.

We are asked to believe that emotional intelligence, an attempt to engage and a sense of humour are no longer qualities we look for in a politician. If that is so now, I don’t think it’s a national mood that will last very long.

This view was reinforced when I watched Gordon Brown at his press conference explaining, ludicrously, that he would not have called the election even if the polls had predicted a landslide. There was no Blair self-deprecating joke, no disarming use of the truth to make a clever argument. I hate to admit that I was a sucker for all that. But if I’m going to have my intelligence insulted, I'd at least like it to be done well.

I didn’t vote for Tony Blair to be Prime Minister, but for those who did to walk away from him now is worse than a crime. It’s a mistake.

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