When Blair swept into Downing Street in 1997, after trouncing a decrepit, demoralized Conservative Party, the streets were lined with cheering throngs. People shouted, screamed, whooped for joy. They even waved Union Jacks! You would have thought the Brits had just won the World Cup or a war or something. When Brown trundled in on Wednesday, however, the streets were pretty much bare. There were crowds and Union Jacks scattered here and there, but just as many people were yelling, “Good riddance, Blair!” and “Britain out of Iraq!” as were shouting a welcome to Gordon Brown.

Brown was not elected prime minister, of course, so there was none of 1997′s post-victory buzz. Under the British system of government, when a prime minister steps down (or is ousted) between elections, the members of the ruling party — not the people — choose his or her successor. Brown is keenly aware that he lacks a popular mandate. He’s also keenly aware that voters are almost as disgusted with his Labour Party as they were with the Conservatives 10 years before. He’s waited a long time for the top job; he has no intention of becoming the British equivalent of a one-term wonder, a kind of Scottish Jimmy Carter.

Brown wants to win the next election, which he can call anytime over the next three years or so, in his own right. That’s why his little speech outside 10 Downing St. was so humble, so earnest, so contrite — so, well, un-Blair-like. And that’s why he’s likely to focus relentlessly on the domestic issues that matter most to British voters: the National Health Service (NHS), education, and housing.

A decade ago, Blair’s political gifts — his soaring rhetoric, his ability to project warmth and sincerity — were crucial in making the Labour Party electable again. Since joining Bush in the Iraq war, though, these same qualities have been Labour’s greatest liabilities. Blair came to be seen by many as smarmy and sanctimonious, stubbornly preaching to a choir that was singing a completely different tune. His sermons — about the NHS, Africa, the war on terror — began to grate as things went from bad to worse in Iraq.

In contrast, Brown — the son of a Church of Scotland minister — sounded as if he were dutifully reciting his catechism when he spoke for the first time as prime minister outside 10 Downing Street. His political agenda never strayed far from home, and his rhetoric barely got off the ground. “At all times I will be strong in purpose, steadfast in will, resolute in action in the service of what matters to the British people,” he intoned. “I’ve heard the need for change. Change in our NHS, change in our schools, change with affordable housing, change to build trust in government, change to protect and extend the British way of life. And this need for change cannot be met by the old politics.” He even quoted his old school motto — “I will try my utmost” — a phrase so appallingly saccharine that people would have retched all over their carpets if Blair had said it.

But Brown was utterly convincing, right down to the way he fumbled with the microphone before he spoke, because, despite more than a decade as Blair’s most powerful ally and rival, he really is different. Brown is a man to whom smiling does not come naturally. When he suddenly remembers to smile — as he did, quite awkwardly, outside No. 10 — his face bursts into an unnatural glare, like a fluorescent light flicked on in a dark room, as opposed to the warm, glowing grin of Blair. Brown is also more of an old-fashioned public servant and less of a glad-hander than his predecessor. He signaled this difference, albeit symbolically, in his first act as prime minister, by revoking the Blair order allowing two special advisors (neither of whom is still in government) to issue instructions to the civil service. That was the clearest sign he could give that the days of the dreaded Blair spinmeisters were over. If the British people really do want change — less spin, more substance; less saving-the-world, more saving-the-NHS — then Brown could well be the man to deliver it.

That is not to say that Brown will ignore foreign affairs or Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States. Brown is just as committed as Blair to Africa. He will robustly defend the free market against the efforts of other European leaders, like French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to constrain it. And he is unlikely to make any drastic course corrections in Iraq, given that Blair announced before he left office Britain’s intention to start withdrawing troops.

But Brown will probably be more bulldog than lapdog when it comes to dealing with Washington. It’s hard to imagine him comfortably donning a bomber jacket and exchanging backslaps with Bush at Camp David. Brown is just as avidly pro-American as Blair, but he is far more enamored of America’s economic policy than its foreign policy. In any case, the first test of the special relationship under Brown is not likely to come from Iraq but from the U.S. Department of Justice‘s investigation of BAE Systems, a U.K.-based defense contractor accused of bribing Saudi officials. The company denies any wrongdoing. The Blair government recently quashed a similar investigation in Britain, further fueling the perception of sleaze at the top. Brown could score two quick victories — establishing his squeaky-clean credentials at home and pleasing the United States — by instructing British officials to cooperate fully with the Department of Justice.

As the Blair family piled into a car to leave Downing Street for the last time, a reporter called out (sarcastically, no doubt) to Cherie, the prime minister’s wife: “We’ll miss you!” Cherie smiled, waved and shot back: “I don’t think we’ll miss you!”

The feeling is mutual. Few people in Britain are sad to see Tony Blair go, despite his many accomplishments. He began the process of repairing and revitalizing the NHS; he brought devolved government to Northern Ireland; in places like Kosovo and Sierra Leone he showed what, before Iraq at least, a “moral” foreign policy might have looked like. He could have been the people’s prime minister, but he went a war too far — and paid the political price.

Even Blair himself seemed relieved to be going. During his final appearance at the prime minister’s question time in the House of Commons, he replied to a query about Britain’s relationship with the European Union by simply saying, “Au revoir, auf Wiedersehen, arrivederci.” After tendering his resignation to the queen, Blair hopped an ordinary commuter train back to his constituency in northern England to quit as a member of Parliament, too. He seemed glad to be done with the bickering and the carping, ready to move on to less thankless tasks — like sorting out that little spot of bother between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Blair started his premiership with the highest of hopes and ended it on a disappointingly low note. Brown takes over with the British people expecting far less of him and of politics in general. But if he’s not deflected from his domestic agenda by foreign crises, he might yet deliver what Blair could not.

At this distance the huge wave of popular revulsion toward the memory of the Thatcher government and all its works seems as unreal as the Diana hysteria, but election night in 1997 had an atmosphere of national vindication that I can only otherwise remember from global sporting events. “Were You Still Up for Portillo?” was the title of one book on the election, referring to the question people asked one another the next morning about the symbolic defeat of one of the most loathed and Thatcherite Conservative ministers.

For the first six or seven years of Blair’s governments, it was literally unthinkable to elect the main opposition party, as the Tories continued to rip themselves apart in the aftermath of defeat. Now Blair has helped revive the Tories as a viable opposition, just as surely as Thatcher once helped reanimate Labor. He will also be emulating her in her post-government career. Both Thatcher and Blair believed Britain’s fortunes lay in becoming a junior partner in the American empire. Having lost his job and squandered his reputation by hewing too closely to the imperial schemes of President Bush, Blair, like Thatcher, will most likely soon be earning much of his living on the other side of Atlantic.

Prior to the debacle in Iraq, for a long time, we trusted Tony Blair. The only segments of the population to regard him as wholly untrustworthy were tiny minorities: traditionalist Tories, outraged by his dealings in Northern Ireland and his ban on fox-hunting; journalists, who had to deal with the arrogant mendacity of his staff; and the small group around the chancellor (or finance minister), Gordon Brown, the man now most likely to take Blair’s place as prime minister when he steps down on June 27. This is a pity because the chancellor was also his closest colleague.

The two men had been friends as well until 1994, when they decided — as Brown believed — that Blair would have a clear run for the leadership of the party, in exchange for a commitment to step down and let Brown have his turn. But the moment for hand-over kept getting postponed as Blair found more to do in the world, and might have been postponed indefinitely had it not been for Iraq.

Along with personal tensions caused by simple ambition, there were profound differences in their attitudes to the Labor Party. Brown was a true tribal loyalist who knew the party well and cared for it. Blair disdained the old party. He was first elected almost as a third-party candidate who would be neither Conservative nor Labor. Instead, he represented something he and his acolytes called “New Labor” — a party, it was understood, that had nothing much in common with the one that Thatcher had defeated. Brown believed in New Labor, of course. He was one of its inventors. But he did not despise old Labor as Blair did, and it did not despise him.

But both men are devout Christians, something deeply unfashionable in Britain, and something that has been concealed, so far as possible, from the electorate. One of the most damaging questions ever asked of Blair in a television interview is whether he had prayed with President Bush — to have answered “yes” would have made him look like a dangerous loony in the eyes of most of the electorate.

Both men, too, shared the belief that America, and the American model of globalization, were the unavoidable future. This may be the greatest casualty of Blair’s time in office, though it’s not at all clear what can replace it, either. To look at Blair’s relationship to America is also, I think, to understand precisely how he continued Thatcher’s attack on the traditional British state.

Until Thatcher, the British Isles were governed by a recognizably imperial system. The empire had gone, but the sort of people who had run it were still running Britain. This is of course the class that Blair belongs to. Under the old British class system money was important, but military prowess, or imperial service, mattered just as much. Traces of this still linger: The fact that Prince Harry is being sent to serve as a junior officer in Iraq is the most vivid illustration of the way in which position in British society is still validated by military prowess.

On the other hand, the British army has not been a serious instrument of national policy since Suez, the defining foreign policy disaster for the postwar generation. The Suez invasion in 1956 established that Britain (and France) could not fight a war without American support even in a country that had been part of our own colonial backyard.

If power in the new, post-imperial Britain did not grow from the barrel of a gun, then it could only arise from money. This was Thatcher’s great insight. She turned on the traditional civil service, believing that business was always more efficient. Blair and Brown carried on her tradition of privatization and the gutting of the civil service. “Special advisors” and P.R. people fanned out across Whitehall to ensure that power would be concentrated in political hands; the traditional administrative caste was sidelined. Shortly before the outbreak of the Iraq war, I interviewed Douglas Hurd, who had been Thatcher’s foreign secretary, and indeed a failed candidate for the leader of the Conservative Party, who lost because he was seen as too posh. He was certainly part of the old establishment, and he was horrified by the thought of the war, and said so. So were people like him throughout Whitehall and in the upper reaches of the army. All of that institutional wisdom was discarded by Blair because, like Thatcher, he had concluded that the only empire that made sense in the modern world was the American one.

“Get up the arse of the White House and stay there,” he instructed an ambassador newly sent out to Washington.

This turned out to be a monumental misjudgment, as we know, but it is one that almost anyone might have made who could have been elected in this country. To look coolly at our own powerlessness produces a kind of despair that any British electorate will reject. Much better to suppose that we are in some ways participants in the American political process and have a share in American power.

In many ways, any British prime minister now is a tributary king, of the sort that we used to install in India and, before us, the Romans had on the fringes of their empire. The British army and air force use American weapons. Our navy has American nuclear missiles, and the fingers on their buttons are American. No British politician believes he or she could be elected without the support of the Murdoch press, owned by an American. But what’s a barbarian king to do when the emperor is mad?

Blair’s enthusiasm for the Iraq war may have come about because he believed in the power of the British army as a force for good in the world, but in a post-Suez, post-Falklands war, this power was entirely dependent on American goodwill. Before the invasion of Iraq he had already fought two and a half wars — the Kosovo campaign, a peacekeeping intervention in Sierra Leone and the “Desert Fox” bombing campaign against Saddam Hussein.

Whether he actually believed the lies his own government told about the danger posed by Saddam Hussein is impossible at this distance for anyone to tell. Probably he himself could not answer the question. In the manner of great salesmen everywhere, he appears entirely to believe whatever he is saying as he says it. But in any case, he had no choice. Given that he knew the Americans were determined to invade, with or without British support, he seems to have believed that allowing them to be defeated on their own, and retreat into a snarling Weimar-ish despair, was the worst possible outcome. If the war had been won, Britain would have been on the winning side.

Perhaps no other prime minister, confronted with those choices, could have chosen differently. Britain is now too small and insignificant to make its way except as part of a larger political union. If you do not believe in the European Union — and the British people don’t — then the only larger body available is the American empire. On the other hand, the empire doesn’t care for us at all. No British prime minister except Thatcher and Winston Churchill can have been so much admired in America. Yet it is impossible to think of a single issue on which Blair has changed American policy.

Out of office, Tony Blair is likely to reinvent himself, or at least to confirm some things that we in Britain had long assumed. An Episcopalian, or Anglican, married to a Roman Catholic, he has been a Catholic in all but name for years now. He has long attended a Catholic church with his family. Persistent and very well sourced reports say that he will be formally received into the church soon after he steps down, and that the only thing to have held him back so far was the thought of the impact such a conversion would have in Northern Ireland.

And now he also goes off to his expected American reward. First, perhaps, he’ll make a quick fortune on the U.S. lecture circuit, and then maybe he’ll take a useful but not too demanding job in the service of the liberal wing of American foreign policy. Just like Margaret Thatcher, he will always be better regarded abroad than at home; just like her, it may turn out that his lasting domestic legacy was to make the opposition party electable.

This is unfair. As the man in charge of the economy for the past 10 years, Brown can argue that all the real successes of the Blair government were his, and all the failures Blair’s. But Blair had the success that really mattered: He got elected. And Iraq, his one great failure, will probably sweep Brown away just as it has destroyed Blair, because it has brought out an extraordinary resentment of America here. Whoever is in power will be tied to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they will be the victims of this growing antipathy when the election comes.

Until the invasion of Iraq, the people who hated Blair were mostly outside the Labor Party. He never had a majority of the voters behind him — even in his greatest triumph, in 1997, he won a huge majority of 197 seats in Parliament with only 43 percent of the popular vote — but the only people who actively hated him were traditionalists, whether on the left or the right. The hatred of the traditionalist Labor voter was precious to Blair. You might argue — and I think his circle believed — that what made him electable after 18 years of Tory rule was that he was known to be despised by everyone who believed in paleo-Laborite socialism and thought Thatcherism should be rolled back.

The hatred of traditionalist Tories — the sort of people, in fact, with whom he had gone to school — he could ignore. He trampled over tradition of every sort, castrating the House of Lords, abolishing — with 48 hours’ notice — the office of the lord chancellor, who had been head of the judiciary for at least a thousand years, banning fox hunting, and in general continuing Thatcher’s contempt for the professions and the civil service.

But none of this mattered until the invasion of Iraq. The invasion was opposed by the left, of course, who had always hated Blair. But it also alienated large sections of the Tory Party and brought anti-Americanism from the fringes of British politics into the center.

Anti-Americanism had always existed among the groups that hated Blair anyway. Though it wasn’t much of a political force before Iraq, the left’s hostility to American imperialism hardly needs rehashing. The old right, meanwhile, took the view that if anyone had to run an English-speaking empire, it should be the English.

Now there is something thin and horrible in the burgeoning hatred of America that reminds me of the itching resentment that Ulster Protestants harbor toward England. In both cases, it stems from the difficult realization that we are part of someone else’s empire, whether or not it is benevolent.

Up until 2003, it probably would have seemed incredible to most British voters that we were part of someone else’s empire. The Iraq war, and the lies that were told to get us into it, have made it clear that we are — and have delivered a prolonged and almost unendurable humiliation for which Blair will always be blamed and for which Bush will always be hated. In a poll before the 2004 American election that asked Britons whether they preferred Bush or Kerry as president, only 16 percent chose Bush. After the election, the Labor tabloid Daily Mirror ran the headline “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”

As soon as the Conservative Party elected as its leader David Cameron, a man too young to be tainted with Thatcherism, Blair’s days were numbered. Cameron wrote much of the very pro-American Conservative manifesto at the last election and must therefore take some responsibility for the failure of the Conservatives to capitalize on Blair’s unpopularity. But since then he has navigated shrewdly to put Blair between himself and Bush. On the anniversary of 9/11 he delivered a speech that was widely considered to be a repudiation of neoconservatism. Of course, this doesn’t actually mean distancing himself from Washington — how many neocons will be found there in 2008? — but it does show clearly what must be done to get yourself elected in Britain today. That Thatcher was at the same moment in Washington offering her support to Bush won’t have harmed Cameron at all.

Cameron seems to share some of Blair’s chameleon qualities. Like Blair, he appears to be an authoritarian who cares nothing for tradition — someone right-wing, perhaps, but not in the least conservative. He doesn’t appear to have Blair’s breathtaking gift of sincerity, which allows Blair to believe whatever he’s saying, no matter what he’s saying. Cameron, like Gordon Brown, seems to know when he is telling lies.

Or at least we think we know that Gordon Brown knows when he is telling lies. The next prime minister — the man who will probably be prime minister by Christmas — remains a mystery. He is powerful, secretive, famously bad at appearing human. Blairites hate him, and his acolytes hate them back. He believes that Blair promised him an early, orderly succession way back in 1994 and that this promise has been repeatedly broken.

Last week, as Labor teetered on the edge of civil war, Charles Clarke, who was sacked by Blair as home secretary in the spring, denounced Brown in two conservative newspapers as someone who “lacks confidence. He is nervous.” This goes back to an old Blairite complaint that Brown is a vicious, cowardly control freak. No one in the Conservative Party could possibly loathe Brown as much as his enemies in the Labor Party do. He is still almost certain to win any election among Labor members once Blair has gone. But the longer Blair stays, the more bitter and damaging that election will be. At the moment the smart money is suggesting a succession in the spring. I am not so sure. If the Labor MPs panic and conclude that they have more to fear from Blair’s staying in power than from a bloody coup, he will be gone more quickly than that, and it will not be tidy.

The Conservatives were rendered unelectable for a full decade by their seething, rancorous hatred of Europe, which was Thatcher’s legacy and which drove the party into a civil war. Labor may choose to destroy itself over the question of anti-Americanism. The joke is that in both cases, all that is at stake are gestures. What else can we do with our economy but trade with Europe? What else can we do with our army but fight as American mercenaries? Perhaps Blair’s real failure was not that he offered his services to the White House, but that he never charged enough.

Blair had achieved the extraordinary feat of persuading the Labor Party to transform itself into a party that wins power. But this time his ability to persuade was exhausted. When confronted with the criticism he had summoned, he offered no argument. Instead, he pushed voters away with a defiant exasperation that provoked their resistance as he challenged them to judge him. Why wouldn’t Blair persuade? Was it just weariness or ambivalence?

Blair knew that arguing over Iraq would blot out his effort to discuss his program for a third term. But his tongue was tied for other reasons as well. As the head of government, he could not speak of his disagreements with Bush. Out of loyalty to an ally, the national interest and protocol, he couldn’t acknowledge that he had urged alternative policies on Bush.

Blair never mentioned how he had wrung a commitment (honored or not) out of Bush to restart the Middle East peace process. He did not discuss how the Bush administration had systematically ignored the British representative in Iraq, Jeremy Greenstock. He did not note that Downing Street spit blood over the depredations visited on it by the bullying John Bolton and the rest of the neoconservative cabal. He did not allude to his national security team’s consternation over Condoleezza Rice’s incompetence. He did not reveal the many ways he had supported Colin Powell in his struggles with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Blair’s stalwart refusal to be transparent about his own good faith and positive actions contributed to his image as dishonest and furtive.

Blair’s interlocutor within the Bush administration, Powell, had a parallel quandary, and they bonded — and were exploited and tarnished together. Of course, if Blair had not joined with Bush he would have opened a large window of opportunity for the Tories. But Blair, like Powell, also convinced himself that going along in public was essential to his efforts to influence Bush behind closed doors. Every time Blair made a slight gain, like Powell, his delusion of influence was reinforced. Both undervalued their leverage.

Blair knew that Bush had no practical post-invasion scenario other than the neoconservative fantasy of a flower-strewn parade. “There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath [of] military action,” according to the memo summarizing the report by Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, to Blair on July 23, 2002.

Before the war, Powell presented the State Department’s 17-volume “Future of Iraq” prospectus, but was ruthlessly shoved aside; Blair, cornered, felt compelled to go to war without a plan. Thus regime change was botched from the start. It was a subject he could hardly discuss in his campaign. He was perpetually cornered.

British prime ministers have misjudged American presidents to their detriment before: Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt over the fate of the British empire, Anthony Eden and Dwight Eisenhower over Suez. The special relationship has been fraught by prime ministers intent on maintaining its veneer. Rumsfeld crudely drew attention to the inherently unbalanced nature of this alliance on the eve of the Iraq war when he declared that British military forces were unnecessary — “There are workarounds,” he said.

In his relationship with Bush, Blair apparently misread the outward signs of American culture and interpreted them through British eyes. Bush can be so amiable and informal dressed in blue jeans that his manner may be mistaken for openness and cooperation when it conceals a particular type of American class superiority and indifference. Bush, after all, seems so friendly compared with the glowering Cheney, who clawed his way upward. It’s not easy for someone who has never traveled in America to grasp the evolution of the Bush family from Northeast patricians to Texas Tories, and the dissolution of the New England character along the way, especially the sense of responsibility, duty and humility.

Bush’s amiability toward Blair merely demonstrates his acceptance of the prime minister into his private club. But even if Blair got Bush exactly right in every nuance, the outcome remains the same. (Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, Blair’s presumed Labor successor, and Bush are a car crash waiting to happen. Bush has an instinctive revulsion against serious intellectuals with little capacity for the locker-room-like banter that is his mode of condescension.)

The underlying events that produced this election result provide a harsh, cautionary and unsettling lesson not only for Blair. British prime ministers to come will take the story of Blair’s embrace of a powerful ally’s mendacity and Blair’s subsequent loss of his country’s trust as a warning. Future U.S. presidents will be regarded with underlying suspicion far into the future. By chastening Blair, British voters have applied the only brake they have on Bush’s foreign policy. But the damage done to the U.S.-U.K. relationship may have incalculable long-term negative consequences for the world.

First there was all the excitement about my existing at all, as Mummy is 45 years old. (Crikey, it’s not like she’s a 65-year-old Italian widow carrying test-tube triplets.) Then came a lot of titillating tabloid speculation over whether I was conceived on vacation in Italy or in France or back home in the prime minister’s residence at No. 10 Downing St. (I, of course, have access to this information, which I will offer for no less than 30,000 pounds as soon as I am able to speak.)

Then, as gossip of a sexual nature began to die down, historians discovered I would be the first baby at No. 10 in 150 years. Someone else then pointed out that my family doesn’t actually live there at the moment, but next door, as there is more room. Now it looks as though we’ll be kicking out Uncle Gordon Brown, who’s chancellor of the exchequer and the official resident of No. 11, from his apartment in our proper house so that I can move in. (Think “Noises Off” with lousy actors.)

Next there was great public tut-tutting followed by earnest medical reassurances when Mummy decided to fly off to Israel and various other exotic locales whilst pregnant. An embarrassing demonstration, I thought, of this country’s hopeless traditionalism or desperation for news — or both; I’m not sure as I haven’t lived here long at all.

But all that was nothing compared to the kerfuffle about whether Daddy should take time off from being prime minister to help look after Mummy and me. They call it paternity leave, though Mummy refers to it as “a basic human right” and Daddy, privately, calls it “a bloody nuisance.”

It all started with Mummy — Cherie, a hot-shot attorney in her own right — telling an interviewer that Mr. Paavo Lipponen, the prime minister of Finland, has twice taken paternity leave. She went on to say, “I, for one, am promoting the widespread adoption of his fine example,” thereby reading Daddy the riot act and airing her elastic-paneled dirty laundry in public.

She’d been going on about it for weeks at home. “Tony, you didn’t take one single day off when Euan, Nicky and Kathryn were born. I break my back reeling in female votes, which got you elected last time, and now, you ungrateful prat, you can’t even take a few weeks off to be with us and bond with the baby, not to mention change a few nappies — FOR ONCE!!”

It’s usually about this time that Daddy interrupts in his best, deeply concerned, leader-of-his-country mode and says how impossible it would be for him to take four weeks off, at which point Mummy says that four weeks is the absolute minimum and then, just to put the fear of God in him, she usually mentions that female members of Parliament are currently agitating for minimum male paternity leave of 13 weeks.

Then Daddy says that his polling shows that only 2 percent of men would take up the option for even one week, let alone 13, and Mummy says that’s because it’s unpaid leave and you would still get your salary. And Daddy says, “Yes, and what an outcry there would be then,” and Mummy says, “Give it to charity or whatever you want, but I want you here with me even if you are a spineless wanker.”

And then they don’t talk at all for a long time.

It all really heated up a couple of weeks ago, when Daddy was interviewed by the BBC and was asked if he had decided to take paternity leave.

“To be completely honest,” said Daddy, “I haven’t thought about it properly yet. I know I should have and I am sure I will. I will decide in the next few weeks. I know I have got to decide soon. Of course there’s a strong case for paternity leave but I’ve got to make sure that the country is properly run, too.”

At which point the interviewer, Mr. John Humphrys (whose wife also is pregnant, and he’s not taking any leave), nailed Daddy by asking, “Don’t you have confidence in your deputy, then?”

Mum blew tea out her nose laughing as Daddy spluttered, “It’s not a lack of confidence in anyone. I just haven’t made up my mind.”

The dithering idiot! I thought he had more balls than that. I am, of course, proof that he has them, but are they big enough? Here I am, a vehicle, naked and pink, ready to bear my Daddy dearest over this nasty patch of politics he’s in at the moment — Northern Ireland going down the drain, the London mayoral election going to hell and everyone saying he’s just a lapdog of the Americans. Use me! Abuse me! Everybody knows that any git with a baby scores major points with the ladies — even if the git in question has too many teeth and a bad haircut. I am — even now — a vote magnet.

Take Uncle Bill Clinton, a chap who knows how to please the fair voter. Asked his opinion of the paternity leave hoopla, he said, “I am envious. He should take paternity leave.” Daddy said that’s easy for him to say, given that his wife won’t sleep with him anymore. Mum threw a saucer at him.

As this point, it may not matter. Daddy is starting to look like a lout and Mum is drawing up a contract for a new nanny. (This one will include a banishment clause for tattling, since our last nanny came this close to selling a tell-all about life among us.) I will have been vanquished in my pursuit of the young, blessed-with-children and female voters, a loss which may haunt Daddy for the rest of his days.

I spit up on his shoulder! I wee on his tie! He has robbed me of in-utero greatness (and the vision of Maggie Thatcher spinning in her grave — if only she were dead).

So, in June, will Daddy be downstairs at his desk or upstairs with us? My guess is that he’ll fudge it. He’ll tell the media that he is taking a week or two off, but privately he’ll expect Uncle John Prescott, who is supposed to be his deputy, and Uncle Gordon, who’ll actually run things, to keep popping to see me — and him. Someone will find out he’s still on the job and he’ll be toast with all concerned.

Frankly, I’m not at all sure that I want him around, trussed in apron strings and whining about his “duties.” He’s hardly a great role model these days. And if he’s as cackhanded about changing nappies as he is about running the country, I don’t want him near my brand-new bum.

Mind you, if I had to wager a couple quid on it, I’d say he’ll do it. It’s either that or more bonding than he bargained for after the election. I’ll still be in nappies and he’ll be out of office — with plenty of time, and poo, on his hands.