Even from beyond the grave, Tony Blair continues to direct British politics, but perhaps not in the way he had hoped. Now he has gone, the nation is not pining for its previous Prime Minister, as most of us predicted. Britain does not seem to be missing him at all. The pangs of separation barely outlasted the absurd standing ovation from MPs that capped the Mr Blair’s last appearance in the Commons.

What has followed is not nostalgia for the Blair style of politics, but the queasiness that follows having drunk too much sweet dessert wine. No wonder we reach for the disgusting brown Fernet Branca. It is this, I believe, that is dictating Gordon Brown’s current run of positive polls and favourable opinions. And it is this that underlies the fit of unease about David Cameron that has ambushed the Conservative Party.

The wave of national suspicion about Mr Cameron has little to do with Mr Cameron: it is Mr Blair’s spectre the voters flee, and that they think they see grinning behind the Tory leader. The wave of national relief that has greeted Mr Brown’s early weeks has little to do with Gordon Brown – still an unknown quantity – but to a shrewd series of signals he is sending out that, whatever he is, he is not Mr Blair.

Do you remember that not two months ago it was the collective wisdom of most thoughtful media commentary that the outgoing Prime Minister would enjoy something of a revival in his popularity after he left office? “We’ll miss him when he’s gone” was the columnists’ cry.

I for one joined it. For a while at least, I thought, a warm glow would descend upon the national recollection of the Blair years. Hectored by a cold and boring Mr Brown bombarding us with statistics, we would remember Mr Blair’s apparent warmth, his folksiness, his humour and his charm. We would miss the stardust, the theatre, the oratory. We would remember too his enormous confidence – a hallmark of leadership – and the way that he strode the world and domestic stage with such apparent ease.

Mr Brown’s enemies in the Labour Party could hardly wait. Gordon has it coming, they murmured; he won’t know what has hit him. Soon a nation and its media will be regretting our churlish and cynical treatment of Tony. Soon we will realise that to be a statesman you have to have stage presence: to know how to stir, to move, to persuade and to amuse. Tony was a master of arts that are essential to this job. Gordon lacks them. He’ll flop. Serve him right for making Tony’s life so difficult.

And the Conservative Party bought this line. To a degree I did too. Like Mr Cameron and his advisers, I thought it sensible for the Opposition not to waste its ammunition on an outgoing prime minister lest the national mood turn in his favour once he had gone. Better, perhaps, for the Tories to present themselves as the party (with the leader) best able to carry on Mr Blair’s work.

I remembered (and for Mr Cameron’s young advisers it will have been a formative memory) the mood of hope and trust after the general election in 1997: a mood that had carried Mr Blair on its shoulders into Downing Street; and I reflected that the Britain which had so warmed to that engaging sense of youth, glamour, style and vision probably still wanted something similar from a leader; and that it was not a bad idea for Mr Cameron to present himself as the modern leader for whom Mr Blair was really just a flawed prototype: “What Blair promised,” Mr Cameron should imply, “is what I’ll deliver. Where he stumbled, I will carry on.”

And though I winced at “heir to Blair” because it seemed dangerously unambiguous, I did not think the underlying strategy wrong. “Leave future historians to expose and dismember the Blair legacy,” I thought, “but for now let the Tories capitalise on the good feeling he left behind.”

How fast it has fled! Within weeks replaced by a sort of shudder bordering, I believe, on self-reproach. “How could we have? Why did we fall for it? How were we taken in?”

In retrospect, it all looks so tacky. The Berlusconi villa holiday, the air-guitar, the tight trousers, the grinning poses with George W. Bush; the Ecclestone affair, the Hinduja brothers, the Mittal affair, the air of inappropriateness that still clings to those secret loans and surprising honours nominations; the Dome, the supercasinos, the arms deals; the funny people in Downing Street. All this we now remember, though somehow at the time we kept drawing a veil over things, giving him the benefit of the doubt.

We remember now the scowling face of Alastair Campbell, we read his diaries and realise it really was as mean and shallow, as sneaky and shoddy, as crafty yet directionless as we half-suspected but never quite let ourselves conclude. Small tales, but all pointing the same way. The feeling is of inappropriateness, shallowness, of sheer bad taste. New dawn? The Giving Age? A nation reborn? We remember the speeches – how overblown they now seem. We are embarrassed that the melodrama touched us at the time; that we did not let ourselves acknowledge what we did always sense: a faint pong.

To be fooled by a quack is sheepishness-inducing; but beyond embarrassment lies shame: David Kelly’s body in a wood; Mr Blair’s denial of complicity in his hounding; the dodgy dossier, the perversion of intelligence, that extraordinary row with the BBC, then the whitewash, though the BBC was right. And of course the Iraq war itself, of which colossal miscalculation I cannot bring myself to write more.

And now after promising to stay Mr Blair vanishes like the Cheshire Cat, leaving British troops virtually under siege in Basra and beleaguered in Afghanistan, Scottish devolution causing a headache for Labour, Lords reform like a half-finished building with rusting reinforcing rods sticking out, and a health service demoralised yet costing nearly twice as much. Meanwhile the electorate, aware that their lover-in-the-night has slipped away, and feeling in some way debauched by the whole heady affair, are looking for someone on whom to take out Britain’s lingering sense of shame.

Enter Mr Cameron, who offers generous hints that for those who fear for the future of Blairism, the Conservative Party is a natural home. And enter Mr Brown, whose first acts as Prime Minister are linked only and signally by being repudiations of Blairite policies and attitudes. No wonder the polls have flipped.

But Mr Cameron’s “heir to Blair” stuff was only a silly marketing ploy; the real Mr Cameron (as Mr Brown keeps pointing out) is a proper Conservative of a fairly classic kind, and none the worse for that. The real Mr Brown, meanwhile, is inextricably tangled in almost everything about the Blair years that Britain should repudiate. Let the real Mr Cameron step forward, and challenge the real Mr Brown to shed his disguises.

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