The occasion was an event at a north London school last Thursday. The purpose of the visit was to provide Blair with an opportunity to calm the horses. With the din from inside his party reaching a crescendo, he had to offer something by way of explanation.

Eight of his junior ministers had resigned over the previous two days. Gordon Brown was waiting in the shadows to be handed the mantle he believes is his by right. That old Blair magic had sprinkled its last. It was time to clear off, or attempt to grasp desperately for a dignified exit in the near future.

He opted to grasp.

The media briefing on Thursday began with a note that stuck in his craw.

"The first thing I'd like to do is to apologise, actually, on behalf of the Labour party for the last week, which, with everything that is going on back here and in the world, has not been our finest hour to be frank, " he said.

Same as it ever was. The Labour party turning on itself and conspiring against the leader. When he assumed control 12 years ago, one of Blair's first major achievements was to unite the party behind him. Now, here it was again, bookending his career at the top by kicking up again. But just as he could be credited with unifying it, so too could he now be blamed as the party reached once more for the self-destruct button.

It was all so different in the years immediately after he was elected leader. By 1994, the Labour party had been in opposition for 15 years, with no prospect of returning to power.

He was going to drag the party, kicking and screaming, into modern politics. Around him he gathered a cabal of serious and savvy men and women. Peter 'The Prince of Darkness' Mandelson, the tabloid hack Alastair Campbell, Anji Hunter, and Philip Gould, a man who could read a focus group at 50 paces.

They devised the Third Way, where left and right met and flowed forward as one. In his book, The Unfinished Revolution, Gould outlined the basic tenet:

"The 'Third Way' appears to be an abstract idea, light years away from the hard lives of ordinary working people. But this is not so.

Working people hold instincts that draw from both left and right, but move beyond them both.

"On a basic level people are tough on crime but supportive of a strong role in education and health. They want a decent society but understand the need to compete and win in world markets."

That was the substance taken care of. The style and the message were just as important.

Here Campbell stepped forward and began to mould himself into a spinmeister supreme.

And so, weighed down with press releases, and a focus group in tow, New Labour marched towards the polls.

Blair took off his jacket to empathise with Britain. He had the smile surgically plastered onto his bright and shiny face, and the Tories began sinking in their own mire.

Within three years, he was in Number 10.

The party never loved him, but the country sure did. Cool Britannia was born. Liam Gallagher and Billy Bragg were hosted at the big house. These boys were more accustomed to kicking down the door, but who could resist that smile? Blairism was going to live forever.

All went swimmingly for the first term.

Any suspicion that spin rather than substance provided the true compass was suppressed in the magic that Blair oozed. Catch phrases like "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" went down a treat. And if there was more emphasis on the former element of the slogan, well, that's the Third Way for you.

There were comparisons with another long-stay British leader, Margaret Thatcher.

The pair, however, were cut from different cloths. The caricature of Thatcher had her referring to her cabinet as vegetables. In Blair's case, the scenario had Campbell telling him how to run the country.

Then Bin Laden sent his lunatics to America, suicide and murder on their minds. The Twin Towers came down and amidst the rubble were the seeds of destruction for Blair's legacy. In the aftermath of the outrage, he said he would follow George Bush wherever the cowboy wanted to go. How 'bout kicking some ass in Iraq, Tone? With three bags full, Mr President.

Irony abounded in Blair's rush to prop up Bush. In British terms, he is a Europhile, who tried desperately to bring his people into the European project. Only when it became obvious that the little Englander mentality would not be overcome, did he concede defeat. Yet once the so-called 'War on Terror' commenced, he threw his lot in with America, spurning the more moderate approach of western Europe. The transatlantic special relationship was cemented, as Blair handed Bush his legacy for safe keeping.

Iraq, as is now patently obvious, was the ultimate exercise in spin. The premise for war was bogus, a lie manufactured in the White House and willingly propagated by Blair and his spinners. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam had about as much kinship with Binners as Bush had with reason.

The draft dodger prospered in his role as commander-in-chief. Where once he shovelled coke up his nose, now he got drunk on the whiff of global power. Like Robert Duvall's character in Apocalypse Now, Bush revelled in the smell of napalm in the morning. And when he tottered on the brink of ridicule, he produced for the American people Mr Tony Blair, a stand-up guy who wouldn't make common cause with a clown. Would he?

The prevailing spin was that Blair had crucial influence over the cowboy. That line came unstuck at the G8 summit last July.

"Yo Blair, " the leader of the Free World greeted his gofor. He proceeded to slap down the prime minister's efforts to intervene in the Israeli bombing of Lebanon. Tony sidled away, tail between his legs, his subservience captured for posterity on Bush's microphone.

The spin was coming apart, that smile beginning to fray at the edges.

Back home, his cabal was no more. Mandelson had disappeared into the darkness once too often. Campbell hightailed it out when he became the story. Hunter and Gould had long taken the corporate dollar. Our hero stood alone, bereft of a power base, exposed to the whims of a party that no longer believed in his magic.

On Thursday, he pleaded for time and space to choose the exact date of his exit, but conceded that he would be gone within 12 months. The horses weren't calmed. The renting of his party continues. His leavetaking will now be extremely messy.

Gordon Brown is Labour's anointed successor, but he won't inherit the Blair mantle.

That dubious honour goes to another, standing on the sideline, watching as a party too long in power turns in on itself.

Step forward David Cameron with your smile and bedside manner, all dressed up to please all the people all the time. Same as it ever was.

Blair calls for halt to in-fighting
LABOUR must focus on policy and not infighting over its leadership to win the next election, the British prime minister Tony Blair has warned.

In his first public speech since saying he would step down within the year, he said Labour was "ideologically united" despite the "spasm" of the last week.

The comments come as exhome secretary Charles Clarke again attacked Blair's likely successor Gordon Brown.

Blair said attacks within the party "turns the public off". He said: "We're three years away from an election and we can remake ourselves."

But Blair said this can only be achieved "by behaving like we did when we were hungry for power before 1997".

He said the party then understood that the country, and not itself, mattered.

The attempt to heal wounds came as Clarke spoke out to the Daily Telegraph. He accused Brown of being unable to work with other people, as well as lacking the courage to take tough decisions.

He said: "He is totally, totally uncollegiate. From my own experience it was very, very difficult to work with him . . . very difficult indeed.

"It was the control freak thing. His massive weakness is that he can't work with people."