LONDON: On a sunny May morning Tony Blair swept to power on a tidal wave of optimism. Ten years later police questioned him in a probe about political corruption.

In 1997, his Downing Street residence was “Corporate Headquarters of Cool Britannia”. In 2007, as he prepared to step down, polls showed the British were affluent but disillusioned.

So why did all that hope turn to such cynicism?

“Why people are so angry is that they trusted him and he projected himself as a trusting figure,” Blair biographer Anthony Seldon told reporters.

“He offered people the prospect of a better world, a better Britain. There was always going to be hubris. No leader can do this. You have had real improvements in Britain but you don’t have the responding gratitude.”

Blair, who told cheering supporters after his landslide victory: “A new dawn has broken”, went from being the most popular Prime Minister in British history to one of the least.

The charismatic politician promising to be “purer than pure” ended up the first British prime minister to be quizzed by police in a criminal inquiry, as detectives probed to see if loans were offered to parties in exchange for state honours.

Blair’s government gave Britain 10 years of steady economic growth, boosted employment, poured money into schools and hospitals and brought peace to Northern Ireland.

But a poll in The Observer newspaper, offering an intriguing snapshot of the nation’s mood, revealed a yawning divide between Blair’s aspirations and people’s perceptions.

Asked if Britain was a happier place to live in 2007, 58 per cent disagreed. Sixty-nine per cent thought it more dangerous.

War in Iraq was singled out as Blair’s biggest failure.

Financial Times commentator and Blair biographer Philip Stevens felt history might be less harsh with the populist leader who polarised people as much as conviction politician Margaret Thatcher once did as Britain’s leader.

“The country is now repudiating Blair but is still pretty content with Blairism — social justice and economic efficiency,” he told news agency.

“The London liberal chattering classes hate Blair with a force they once directed against Margaret Thatcher. But he still represents where the nation is.”

Conservative leader David Cameron, battling to bring his party back from a decade in the political wilderness, may mock Blair and say “he was the future once”, but many see Cameron himself as a youthful mirror image of the Labour Party leader.

Familiarity may breed contempt with many long-serving leaders, especially in a corrosively cynical press, but few would dispute Blair had an unerring ability to echo the national mood when tragedy struck. Mirroring the nation’s outpouring of grief as the royal family seemed paralysed by its sheer enormity, Blair hailed “People’s Princess” Diana after her death in a car crash.

After 9/11, he eloquently expressed the world’s outrage over the Twin Tower bombings. A day after London landed the 2012 Olympics, 52 people were killed by suicide bombers in the British capital and he sought to steady jangled nerves.

“He had his thumb on the national pulse on those three occasions and I don’t think he has lost it,” said Stevens.

But that is also where problems arose, when charm, eloquence and persuasion were not enough for a complete package.

Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley said of Blair: “Fantastic at the poetry of politics, he was less accomplished at the prose of governing.”

On taking power, Blair said: “Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.”

But from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Kosovo to Sierra Leone, he has now sent British troops into battle more than any other British Prime Minister since World War II. So, after a rollercoaster ride that promised so much as a new millennium beckoned, how much has Britain changed?

For novelist Robert Harris the decade was a tragedy: “Blair was of my generation and this was our shot if you like. I won’t say we’ve messed it up but it perhaps hasn’t lived up to all the expectations of that rosy-fingered dawn of May 1, 1997.”

After 10 years interviewing and observing Blair, BBC documentary-maker Michael Cockererll encapsulated the paradoxes of Blair’s emotional relationship with the British people: “It began when the charismatic prime minister swept people off their feet. But the early glow has long since dimmed and at the end of the affair both sides are sadder but wiser.”—Reuters