History will reach its own verdict on Tony Blair's 10 years as Britain's Prime Minister, and it may be a more generous one than the voters delivered in this week's local and Scottish elections. Because the date of his departure has been so long arriving - he first signalled it in 2004 and it is still some weeks ahead - the country has come to feel somewhat leaderless and directionless. At such a time a bored and listless public will kick the man still nominally in charge. But the harshest of the judgements on the Blair decade - that his administration was morally rotten to the core from the start - is vastly unfair. Nor was he the inventor of the black arts of "presentation". In a media world saturated with spin, all politicians have to watch how their remarks will be interpreted.

The one area where Mr Blair's sin of spin was much more than venial was Iraq. He exaggerated the strength of the case for invasion, believing that what was found on the ground would retrospectively complete the gaps in the evidence available beforehand, and he lost the gamble. His reputation for trustworthiness has never recovered. The effect of his deviousness was to align Britain with a reactionary American president in the grip of a neocon fantasy about a "new American century", which further antagonised his own Labour rank and file. He never tried to address the problem, and thus it became his biggest blind spot.

Part of his legacy is the discovery by the Conservative Party under David Cameron of a form of Blairism of its own, as the only way to make itself electorally credible. Ideological and philosophical differences between the main parties are now hard to find. Indeed, Blairism is itself anti-ideological - the very term New Labour translates as not Old Labour, and hence not socialist. In such an apolitical context feelings play a larger role, as members of the public decide whether they "like" or "dislike" someone they have never ...

The current convergence of interests between the British Government and the Vatican is remarkable. Pope and Prime Minister almost simultaneously pressed the current chairman of the G8, Chancellor Merkel of Germany, to put Africa at the head of the agenda for the forthcoming world summit - successfully, as it now appears. Then the Environment Secretary David Miliband goes to Rome to praise papal leadership in connection ...

It is almost too easy to hold American gun law responsible for American gun crime. The ready availability of firearms is undoubtedly one of the reasons why a student at Virginia Tech shot and killed more than 30 university members - fellow students and academic staff - before turning his weapon on himself. But it also has to be noted that the pro-gun lobby is saying that if more students carried guns, he could have ...

Though he is concerned to preserve Catholicism's unity and identity, the fundamental characteristic of Pope Benedict's papacy so far has been his tone of encouragement rather than of disapproval. Explaining in an interview why during his visit there he had not joined the Spanish bishops' denunciation of proposals to recognise gay relationships, he replied: "Christianity, Catholicism, isn't a collection ...