Northern Ireland is very boring, a colleague remarked to me yesterday as we idly watched Tony Blair having tea with Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley. And thank God it is, I replied. Don’t you remember when Northern Ireland was interesting?

So goes a political life: damned if you get it wrong, taken for granted when you get it right. The public responds to the remarkable achievement of getting NHS waiting lists down from 18 months to 18 weeks with a shrug and a lead for the Conservative Party on health.

So jaded are we about the Prime Minister – him again, groan – that many are not prepared even to give him credit for the undeniably great achievements of his ten years in office: peace in Northern Ireland, for instance, the DUP and Sinn Fein in government together. He announces his departure this week to a chorus of hisses and jeers, apparently swept away on a wave of national loathing.

Don’t you believe it. Once Mr Blair has stepped down, his temporary unpopularity will fade faster than the smile on Gordon Brown’s face. I am finding it hard to discern anyone outside the media, Westminster and the blogosphere – the people who dominate public debate – who actively dislikes the Prime Minister. Most think he has done a reasonably good job and was quite funny with Catherine Tate on Comic Relief. And that’s pretty good going after ten years in office.

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

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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

Mind you, ten years in office is pretty good going in itself. Have we become so mean-spirited that we cannot even applaud that achievement? To survive ten years in No 10 is an extraordinarily difficult feat, particularly under the constant media scrutiny that prime ministers today have to face. To do so while raising a young family is almost superhuman.

For the Blair children, these past ten years must often have felt like hell. I knew a girl in the same class at school as Kathryn Blair a few years back. What was it like for Kathryn, I once asked. This classmate, who had not a malicious bone in her body, replied that it was hard for her because everyone knew she got special treatment being the Prime Minister’s daughter. Such as? I asked. The school had recently got some new computers and they went to Kathryn’s class. “Everyone thinks it’s because of who her dad is.”

What a nightmare for poor Kathryn, and presumably for her brothers too, although from the sound of it their school was more rarefied than hers. MPs and headteachers try to send their kids to schools outside the area for which they are responsible, so that their children don’t get targeted; there is no such get-out clause for the children of the Prime Minister. I think we as a nation owe them some gratitude for being prepared to put up with so much for so long. And no, a smart house and getting to meet lots of famous people doesn’t make up for it.

Which brings us to Cherie, and the commonly held view that she was only really in it for that – the status and the money. Lady Macbeth, the wicked witch: from the moment she was snapped in her nightie taking in flowers at her home in Islington the morning after the election, this intelligent, independent woman has had to guard everything she says and everything she does, while facing a relentless barrage of criticism over how she dresses and looks. For ten years. How many of us could have pulled that off with as few slip-ups as she has made?

Naturally the enemies are piled up now. That began as soon as the Blairs entered No 10. First to turn on them were the fashionable friends, fairweather allies who were put out at not being given jobs, or dinner, or invitations to “cool Britannia” drinks at Downing Street. If you are Prime Minister, it is easy to snub badly all those people who thought they might be able to call you their friend. And they become the bitterest enemies, because they’re personally offended – as Gordon Brown is about to discover. That’s before you even start to irritate your own MPs, ex-ministers, the doctors, the teachers, fox-hunters, Lords and all the rest. After ten years of that it is pretty amazing that recent polls have shown a half of all voters still rating Mr Blair a good prime minister overall, and a majority thinking him “likeable”. After ten years at the top!

His one huge failure on the domestic front was in the betrayal of that first promise: education, education, education. But from the minimum wage to civil partnerships, state-funded childcare to a well-resourced NHS, devolved assemblies and peace in Northern Ireland too, this is a man who has shifted the culture of Britain and the centre of gravity of its politics. Whether you bought into Cool Britannia or not, we are a hell of a lot cooler than we were ten years ago.

The Prime Minister has had his kicking these past few months but as soon as he goes, the voters will feel a sense of shock and even loss. Mr Blair has been the backdrop to this country for so long and through so many nerve-shattering events: 9/11, 7/7, foot-and-mouth, the death of Diana. Media excitement over the next story, the Cameron-Brown contest, is overlooking the separate shock that will be the departure of the Prime Minister.

More than anything else, he was adept at enunciating the national mood. He had an instinct, as we saw again and again, for what to say and what to do. We do not know whether Mr Brown – who has operated for so long in opposition to Mr Blair rather than as a man in his own right – possesses it too. Tomorrow, as the hand of history steers the Prime Minister firmly out of No 10, we shall begin to find out.

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