These convictions drove Blair to stiffen President Bill Clinton's resolve and, despite vehement Russian and Chinese opposition, forced the Serbian leader Slobodan Miloševic to break off his strategy of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999. They also underpinned his attitude towards Saddam Hussein, who along with Milosevic was the only foreign leader specifically singled out for mention in the Chicago speech, well before George W. Bush appeared on the scene. Indeed, far from the UK acting as "poodle" to the US President, the close Anglo-American co-operation after 2001 represented the conversion of a Republican determined to eschew the nation-building nostrums of the Democrats into a full-blown interventionist determined to recast the Middle East by deposing its (then) worst dictator and supporting the growth of democracy. 

Although the post-conflict planning was woeful, in particular the failure to move to rapid elections, the removal of Saddam Hussein was the precondition for progress in Iraq. The country is a much freer place today than it ever was under the Baathists and no longer poses any threat to its neighbours or the region. Strikingly, a BBC poll published in February 2006 — nearly three years after the invasion and in the midst of the turmoil — showed that 74 per cent of Iraqis supported the removal of Saddam Hussein.

What recent events have shown is just how much the Conservative establishment now shares Tony Blair's analysis of the world outside. The determination of David Cameron, William Hague, George Osborne and Michael Gove to punish the Syrian regime vividly contrasts with the steadfast refusal of John Major's government to intervene earlier over Bosnia in the 1990s when about 100,000 people, mainly Muslim civilians, were killed and more than a million  displaced or deported. One can argue about the wisdom of intervening, but not about the fact that President Obama — who like Bush had originally set out to act with more humility on the world scene — is following where Cameron has led, not the reverse as many in parliament and the country seem to believe.

In short, whatever the vote in Westminster and the current public mood may appear to suggest, Tony Blair fundamentally changed the way in which Britain thought and acted on the world stage, and very much for the better.