Robin Wilson (Belfast, Policy Analyst): Tony Blair deferred his resignation announcement until one last photo-opportunity-the renewal of devolution to Northern Ireland on May 8th 2007- even though that ensured nationalists would give Labour a bloody nose in Scotland and Wales. It was a measure of the egocentricity of the man, which he paraded on a global scale with George W Bush, though polling evidence showed that the vast majority of UK citizens believed the Blair legacy was the humanitarian disaster of Iraq rather than the 'solution' of the Irish question.
It was that same egocentricity - "I feel the hand of history on my shoulder" - which lay behind the sofa government by which Blair replaced cabinet collectivism and by which he concluded the Belfast agreement, with his Northern Ireland secretary, Mo Mowlam, marginalised. Unlike in 1974, when Northern Ireland devolution legislation was preceded by green and white papers, and in marked contrast to the background of the Scotland Act in the Constitutional Convention, the agreement emerged in draft form only days ahead of its promulgation, with no opportunity to subject its contents to democratic debate.
For two thirds of the intervening decade, the power-sharing institutions at its core have been inoperative. As a product of private negotiation rather than public deliberation, the agreement is studded with the sectarian vetoes which the partis pris negotiatiors were determined to entrench (vetoes reinforced in Blair's desperate subsequent efforts to woo the Paisleyite Democratic Unionist Party) and then to use. And the key role allocated to paramilitaries ensured the agreement bequeathed an atmosphere of moral hazard, issuing in the impasse over weapons decommissioning.
Ten years on and there are nearly 50 officially recognised "peace walls" in Northern Ireland. As I write, Channel Four News is running an item on persistent paramilitarism. As in so much else with Blair, much spin, little substance.
