Goodbye to all that

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’.