Tony Blair's resignation speech

The following highlights are not verbatim unless in speech marks...

12.21: It's been an honour to have been Prime Minister.  I think I have got lots of things right.  Apologies for the times I have fallen short.  "Good luck."

12.19: "The British people are special... This is a blessed nation. This is the greatest nation on earth."

12.18: "Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.  I may have been wrong.  That's your call."

12.16: We cannot give up in Iraq. The terrorists won't.

12.12: On fighting poverty in Africa, combating climate change and fighting terrorism Britain is not a follower in the world - but a leader.

12.10: I am proud of the way we have changed the culture of Britain: the minimum wage, paid holidays, paid maternity pay, equality for gay people.

12.08: No other post-war government has presided over more jobs, less unemployment, lower crime, more spending on health and education and economic growth in every quarter.

12.05: I will stand down as Prime Minister on 27th June.

Related link: A first judgment on the Blair years by Nick Wood

Comments

[chrisblore]

"Politics may be the art of the possible but at least in life give the impossible a go."

How cheesy! A typically Blairite speech as only he knows how to deliver one.

[MrB]

It was a very good speech if we're honest, especially towards the end.

Reminds me why we've been out of power for a decade.

[Jonathan Sheppard]

However he can deliver a good speech and you will only have to contrast that with what we will soon have to put up with.

This is why the Labour party will miss Blair. I just can't imagine Brown appealing to those who went over (and stayed) to Labour in 97.

[Jaz]

"The British people are special... This is a blessed nation. This is the greatest nation on earth."

Wonderful line...

[Alan S]

How many more resignation speeches will he give!?

PS Interest rate up to 5.5%

[Felicity Mountjoy]

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, Jaz!

[simon]

Sedgefield was the only place in the country he'd get away with that drivel laden farewell speech! Oddly enough no mention of :- Eccleston, the Hindujas, Cash for Honours, sexual sleaze ( Prescott, Davies, Blunkett, Cook), the rise in violent crime, the rise of illegal immigration.... The 'emotion' he tried to put on during the speech did not work, and he'll try the same thing on his last PMQ's. Cameron must be ready....

[DrFoxNews]

Ian Hislop is ripping the speech apart on ITV News. Quite uncharitable. Most enjoyable.

[chrisblore]

Prescott has resigned!

[Jonathan Sheppard]

AS he said he would once Blair did.

[chrisblore]

Yes. Not a moment too soon to get rid of this guy who has been effectively just "minister for the Labour Party" since the last scandal with him no longer having been trusted to do his old job and replaced by Ruth Kelly.

[sjm]

You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at it, or be sick.

[Felicity Mountjoy]

No mention of Gordon in the speech.

[Chappers]

Does anyone else feel physically sick at the sight of the BBC Politics page?! Unbelieveable.

[simon]

A bit off topic, but i think the best summary on Bliar in power was good old Reg Keys giving the nong a mauling at the last general election. That was pure gold.

[Peter Hatchet]

Look how dated that;

"new Labour"
"new Britain"

slogan looks.

Haven't seen that for years.

[Patsy Sergeant]

Somebody speculated in the media yesterday as to why Blair would want to go to Trimdon to give his 'farewell' speech. Well I think that became completely obvious as one watched - an audience that was totally appreciative (not to say adoring), uncritical and hanging on his words. So as a package, whoever organised the whole event did a masterly job, and in his speech, I noticed that he was doing his usually cut-throat propaganda on the conservative party (he is not about to let the local election successes have any lasting effect, if he can manipulate the media!).

I was astounded at the things/policies that he was still claiming as achieved, I suppose one shouldn't really be so surprised when you think of how successful a successful con man is!

[Andrew Woodman]

It was pure fantastist. One example was 'We got the olympics in 2012 which we wouldn't have done 10 years ago'

How did we get events like Euro 96 if this country was incapable of holding anything, and who secured the games, Tory Lord Coe. His legacy is Iraq and nothings he says or does in the final farewell will change that.

[Curly]

Did anyone notice anything else happening durin the tears at Trimdon? Did you see the hundreds of faithful grasping out to hug Cherie too?

[James Burdett]

It was typical Blair, but then we always knew it would be. It was held in Trimdon because it was the only place he had a prayer of replicating the mass adulation that accompanied his arrival as PM!

Let him have his glorious swansong, most people will pay it little attention. He is one of only a handful of PM's to serve 10 consecutive years in power. That if nothing else is an acheivement and we should not be uncharitable about that. We should simply work to ensure that at the next election Labour are not elected.

[Sally Roberts]

Got it in one, Patsy!

[Andrew Lilico]

It seems to me that most of these comments are churlish to say the least. One does not have to agree with everything (or, if you must, anything) that Blair did, but we diminish ourselves, not him, by being crowing and abusive at his departure.

[William Norton]

Andrew Lilico: I agree entirely.

[Editor]

Excellent contribution to this morning's Today programme, Andrew Lilico.

[simon]

I certainly do not agree. That man ( Bliar), with the aid of Labour toadies, drove a civil servant to suicide ( or was it something else). The contempt i have for Bliar is beyond words. If you do not get angry at that, something is wrong.

[RobD]

As much as he was a deceitful, arrogant and sleazy PM he was at least the best Labour Prime Minister we could have hoped for and will probably ever get.

I fear for the country with Brown in charge, it is likely to take more than a term of a Conservative government to reverse the damage that Brown is likely to inflict over the next 3 years.

So, let us be pleased that Blair is going but congratulate him for the achievement of staying in power for 10 years and hope that Brown's rule is short.

[CDM]

"I did what I thought was right".

Since when did this become an acceptable defence?

[George Hinton]

What an absolute load of tosh. From start to finsh, 10 long bloody years, Blair and NuLab have relied on spin, disinformation and the use of misinformation and propaganda to give the impression of dynamic progress. Even at the end he couldn't resist the same old tired and hackneyed cliches and phrases.

Sorry Tone, we've heard it all before and like the king with no clothes we've seen through the smoke and mirrors.

All the ballyhoo in 1997 led the country to believe that we would have change and a government that we could trust. Unfortunately we seem to have had cruel practical joke played upon us. NuLab under B-Liar have been an unmitigated disaster for the country, ranging from mendacity and corruption, empty rhetoric and broken promises, the use of spin and propaganda to mask the lack of policy, the war in Iraq and Dr Kelly's untimely demise, to the disgrace of Gordon Brown's unprecedented raid on the pension funds of the electorate.

I feel cheated that he has not been impeached, tried and jailed. Legacy? his legacy will be that of the worst PM this country has had, throughly corrupt and mendacious. It is an outrage that he will earn vast sums of money and will be given a place amongst the great and good; personally i feel a graffitoed wall, somewhere in a sink estate, wallowing in hoodies and high unemployment and single mothers, would be the ideal end for the man, as he faces a firing squad, drawn from the services and middle classes of middle Britain

[comstock]

His legacy is Iraq

Sadly, Andrew, it will be. But it will also be IDS's legacy, because he supported it when he could have stopped it.

IMHO his greatest achievment is the minimum wage (and related things like holiday pay for all).

That is the one thing he has done that has benefited millions of the poorest without harming the rest of the country.

Thats what I'm most grateful to him for, and that should be his legacy.

[Andrew Lilico]

See the views of three historians here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6636091.stm

I'm with Andrew Roberts, and I think the rest of you are frankly rather small. The truth is that he beat us, fair and square, three times, and he beat us very badly. And he beat us because he was lot better than us at it - which is saying something, because the Conservative Party was a fantastic machine that had, given time, crushed all opponents over the previous 100-odd years.

What he did with his power...well, I'm not a socialist or a social democrat, so I'm not going to agree with much of his domestic stuff. All I can say is that for what seem to me to be the worst things he did - the vandalism of the British constitution and the attack on traditional British freedoms and due process - Conservatives offered almost no coherent opposition at the time. If we had, it's not impossible that he might have listened.

The best things he did were on extra-EU foreign policy, including ventures that we opposed at the time (such as Sierra Leone) or were doubtful about (such as Serbia). His foreign policy moves promoted Britain to the rank of Second Global Power, and place him firmly in the next-to-front rank of British premiers - behind Thatcher and Gladstone and Churchill and Pitt the younger, perhaps, but alongside Disraeli and Palmerston and Pitt the elder.

As Roberts says, this nonsense of trying to smear him as a liar over Iraq will, with the perspective of time, come to be seen as the petty anti-imperialist BBC hate campaign that it was. The only shames about Iraq are that he couldn't persuade Clinton to go in in 1998 and that the US administrators botched the reconstruction effort so badly after they did go in, but it's hard to see how Blair is really to blame for either of those.

He was Prime Minister for ten years. How many of you crowers are going to achieve that?

[ACT]

Will and Andrew are spot on - it's been a graceless response on the whole to the PM. And reminds of nothing so much as the frothing lefties engaged in when Thatcher celebrated 10 years in Number Ten. But now for something controversial - leaving the way Blair has has been far wiser than the way she did. We still haven't recovered from the harm done by Thatcher being stabbed in the back, front and side. Labour, for all their problems at the moment, are not going to have to face a caesura like that. Brown's succession is going to be orderly and well managed - and even if it's not the single optimum thing that could happen for them right now, virtually any other outcome than this one would have poisoned them for a generation too. Who deserves the credit for Blair bowing out in this way? Blair obviously - he could have decided to fight it out, and drag Labour into a civil war like our own, but he hasn't. It's his final gift to his own party, and while we probably won't ever recognise it as such, it's yet one more aspect of the man's instinctual political genius

[Yet Another Anon]

Ian Hislop is ripping the speech apart on ITV News.
Ian Hislop is not really a serious commentator though, all that stuff about George W. and the Church of Latter Day morons was pretty idiotic - George W. Bush is a Methodist and most of the NeoCons are Protestant Evangelicals of one sort or another not Mormons so why say it? In his own words Ian Hislop is a banana.