A 'New Dawn' Turns Gray.(Tony Blair)

Cartoonists used to draw him walking on water. It was a neat device, hinting at two things we thought we knew about Tony Blair. First, that he was a political miracle worker, able to win landslide victory after landslide victory. Second, that he was as clean and pure as You Know Who.

And it was not entirely a joke. People of my generation, who had grown up during 18 years of Thatcherism and watched a tired Conservative administration eventually drown in scandal and sleaze, genuinely sensed in Blair and New Labour something different. We believed they were going to give us a smarter, cleaner politics.

It certainly felt that way in the spring of 1997, when day after day the sun shone in a clear blue sky--a rare treat in usually gray Britain. The weather reflected the national mood; we were about to make a fresh start. Those spring weeks were dominated by an election campaign, but it was hardly a contest: everyone knew Blair and Labour would win. Blair captured the mood, that bright morning when the votes were counted. It was a "new dawn."

What's remarkable is how long the honeymoon lasted. When a scandal broke early in his tenure--alleging that Labour had taken a donation from the boss of Formula 1 motor racing in return for a shift in government policy--the prime minister killed the issue simply by going on television and declaring, "I'm a pretty straight kind of guy." Voters believed him; the scandal withered. It's this bond of trust between Blair and the voters which the postwar row over Iraq has frayed so badly. It's not so much this or that specific charge or tussle with the BBC, but rather the nagging sense that the P.M. led the country into ...