It ends, as it began, with a political conjuring trick. The splicing together of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness must, by any standards, rank as one of the most extraordinary achievements in recent politics, and reflects, among other things, the sleepless kinetic force that was Tony Blair’s greatest asset.
It was the same force that pushed through the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, as Mr Blair promised to reconcile the irreconcilable, square the circle, plot the uncharted ‘Third Way’. In Ulster, he has been rewarded. But the method failed him more often than not.
Even before he was elected, the Labour leader swore that he could pump money into Britain’s public services without raising taxes: more than 100 tax increases later, those words seem laughable. He promised to encourage social mobility, yet abolished the Assisted Places Scheme that enables less affluent children to enjoy the benefits of private education.
He claimed to understand the rising expectations of patients as taxpayer-consumers, yet left in place an NHS that is still, in essence, a horrifically unwieldy centralised bureaucracy.
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