Blair's farewell

So Blair has gone - I've seen snippets of his last day, Prime Minister's Questions, then his departure from Downing Street with Cherie to see the Queen. Now Gordon Brown is on the radio giving his first speech. Somehow it feels momentous, more than I'd expected. Things really are radically different now from 1997. I remember how optimistic we all were, the euphoria. It really did seem as if a dark cloud had lifted. For those of us who brought up children during the Thatcher years it had been a punishing time.
Whatever one thinks of Blair, and I have to say my feelings are very, very mixed, he is an extraordinary performer, and that's the key - performer. He knew how to do that more than anything, and Brown will be completely different. I'm deeply conflicted in my opinions of Brown - I don't trust him an inch, but appreciate what he's done, for pensioners for example. My mother is vastly better off than she was under the Tories, when she received a pittance. Tax credits have helped people enormously, but the way it's been developed and administered has been a fiasco. It seems that Brown just gave the orders and left it to a bunch of management consultants to devise the structure. It works well for people with steady jobs, whose income doesn't fluctuate, or for people who live on benefit, but for people with chaotic lives, or the self-employed, or for those who major changes in their circumstances, it works very badly.
Anyway, we shall see. He isn't going to be able to predict events to the same extent, so it'll be interesting to see how he responds to things he can't control. This government has been the first one that's been run by people of my generation and I can't say they've made an especially good job of it. Not better than previous generations anyway. Spin and soundbites, while they existed under the previous government, really took off under this one. The enormously enjoyable BBC-4 comedy, The Thick of It had it nailed.
I'm wondering how different things are going to be; Brown has rising interest rates, what is now becoming a crisis in housing, Iraq, and climate change to contend with. I can't say I'm going to miss Blair - it's definitely time for him to go, but I have a funny feeling the Brown era may not turn out to be straightforward. And of course htere's always the unpredictable; I always keep in mind Harold Macmillan's reply when asked which factors had the greatest impact on his political life; 'events, dear boy, events'.