The Guardian has a list of the top "ten defining Blair moments" that is part of the series it is running on the prime minister who will be leaving office by the summer. Blair is a weary man, and the most recent hostage crisis was just the latest stress-inducing event, piled on with Iraq, the cash-for-peerages scandal, a series of incompetent Cabinet ministers unworthy of working alongside Blair--not to mention his own chancellor of the exchequer whose main activity over the past decade, next to balancing Britain's books, has been to complain that he's not PM yet. All one hears about Tony Blair is his unpopularity. Judging by the list compiled by the Guardian, which, next to the Mirror (and, as Isaac notes, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, whose negative output on Blair has been enough to match any British newspaper, and then some), has been most unkind to Blair, it's difficult to understand the unremitting hostility that the prime minister engenders. This is the man who can claim a great portion of the credit for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, who introduced major reforms for the country's health and education systems, whose government repealed Margaret Thatcher's odious Section 28 and who convinced NATO to support the United States in averting a genocide in Kosovo. The real tragedy of Tony Blair is that Britons, especially those in Labour, do not realize how grateful they ought to be to him. They have responded all out of proportion to the bad news in Iraq and seen to it that his legacy be utterly damned. This is a shame. With all due consideration to his faults, Tony Blair is the man who broke Labour from its constitutional socialism and made the party electable. Those on the British left would do well to remember that before Tony Blair, the Tories were in power for 17 years. Love him or hate him, Tony Blair is the reason why center-left politics is possible in the UK today. --James Kirchick