In May 1997 a new Prime Minister strode up Downing Street on a crystal morning to a deafening volley of camera shutters, high-fiving and blowing kisses, while adoring crowds lined the way, waving flags and screaming in chorus.

In May 2007, the day that a veteran Prime Minister announced his retirement and returned to Downing Street for the coda to his term, only the photographers and cameramen remained. They waited in dispirited clumps under a drizzling rain, like damp pigeons roosting under eaves. And then Tony Blair sneaked in through the back door.

At the end of an era, it was perhaps fitting that Blair should arrive invisibly.

I remember looking up, ten years ago, at the top-storey windows of Downing Street, and seeing the Blair children gazing down in rapt excitement at the tumult below. Yesterday I stood in exactly the same spot, but already the house had the dreary look of a place waiting for the removal van. Even the gum-chewing policeman on the front door looked ready to move on.

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A flunky arrived with a clean shirt on a hanger, but of the Prime Minister himself there was not a sign. It was a deeply odd and appropriately anticlimactic occasion: an empty shirt moment.

“Pity,” observed one of the photographers as he packed up his damp equipment. “I was going to play him Things Can Only Get Better on my mobile.” The euphoria of 1997 seemed like a distant world, which of course it was.

“Think back,” Mr Blair had said earlier in Trimdon Labour Club. “No, really, think back to 1997.”

OK. I’m thinking Princess Diana, the release of the first Harry Potter book and the Spice Girls at the peak of their fame. I am remembering a time before we knew of Alastair Campbell, or iPods, or Basra and Guantanamo Bay; when Northern Ireland still meant blood and gunmetal. A time when mobile phones were new and unwieldy, and ringtones a thing of far future.

I am remembering Blair descending in a helicopter and then emerging on the South Bank to declare “a new dawn has broken”, and not one person in the crowd sniggered.

Much of what has changed in the past ten years has nothing to do with Blair himself; yet in years to come, this tumultuous decade will be bracketed as the Blairite era.

How have the Blair years changed us, not in terms of policies, but as a culture? We are, in no particular order, more sceptical, frightened, violent, cautious, fatter, suspicious, drunker and more tolerant than we were a decade ago. Anyone with a house feels rich; anyone without, impossibly poor. Mockery on the grounds of race or sexual orientation is forbidden, but mocking of other classes is allowed — of chavs and pikeys if you are middle-class; of air hostesses if you are friendly with royalty. The class war has returned by stealth.

The world before Blair now seems strangely naive, seen through a prism of war. In 1997 Kate Moss had gathered no moss. Pete Doherty was celebrating his A-level results (2 As, 2 Bs), and has been celebrating ever since.

The food in Britain got better under Blair, the traffic and television worse. We developed an extraordinary fascination with watching ordinary people doing unutterably boring things in the form of reality television, yet we are a slightly less prurient culture than we were ten years ago. I think this is the Edwina Currie-John Major effect. Somehow, the discovery of that liaison rather took the glamour out of celebrity sex exposés.

We are a less deferential nation, better dressed, more private, noisier, but not happier. Mr Blair hailed a bright new dawn, but we may look back on his decade as a time of anxiety (unless you happen to be a fox). We have a fear of terrorism, climate change, “mad cow” disease and GM food and a slump in house prices. We discussed the virtues of thinness and health more than ever, and grew ever larger. We went to museums as never before, and read more books (though fewer titles) and communicated, in words, using e-mails and texts, in ways no one had imagined.

The Blair years may be remembered as the time when everyone started writing to everyone else.

This was a time of mind-bending changes. Even if these were not the changes that he, or anyone else, predicted when life seemed simple back on May 2, 1997.

I have another vivid memory of that day, as we waited for the triumphant Blairs to arrive at Downing Street. An officious aide barked that I had wandered into the section of the crowd reserved for “real people” (ie, the party faithful) and could I please get back in the media pen, right now? It was a premonition of the extraordinary political control to come.

Yesterday, as we waited in the rain for Blair, a policeman wandered wearily over to say: “I’ve just spoken to the people in the house, and they say you can take photographs from there,” he pointed to a caged area, “but not from there,” a spot abut two feet nearer the door. It was a fitting last moment — choreographing a photo opportunity that was never even going to happen.

Some things have changed in ten years, and some have hardly changed at all.

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