One often hears in Britain that all political careers end in failure, but Prime Minister Tony Blair was wise enough to announce his resignation now rather than wait to be voted out of office like this predecessor John Major, or be booted out by his own party like Major's predecessor Margaret Thatcher.

So Mr. Blair should be able to leave office on June 27th with his dignity intact, despite the fact that 71 % of his fellow citizens no longer trust him and only 4 % think he was a great prime minister. His biggest problem of course has been the war in Iraq, but more on that later.

Opinion polls are just snapshots and the scribbling of journalists is only the first draft of history, so I would rather ignore the flood of instant punditry unleashed by Mr. Blair's resignation, and try to see how history will treat a man who was both an exceptionally gifted politician and a friend of America.

He will certainly be remembered for having made the Labor Party electable after 18 years of Conservative government under Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Major. The young Tony Blair dragged an old-fashioned socialist party kicking and screaming into the middle of the political road, and kept it there to win three straight elections. That was a major political accomplishment.

So was the restoration of shared government between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. I never thought I would see the day when the Reverend Ian Paisley - whose fire and brimstone fulminations against the Catholics echoed through the troubled decades of the latter 20th century - would not only share power but share friendship with the ex-gunmen of Sinn Fein. Mr. Blair worked tirelessly to make that possible, and succeeded in sealing the deal in Northern Ireland only days before his resignation.

He will also get credit for presiding over a booming economy with low unemployment, even though the foundations for that accomplishment were laid by his Conservative predecessors.

M. Thatcher

In many ways, Blair's years in office were a continuation of Thatcherism by another name. In an interview shortly before he was first elected prime minister, Blair told me that the “Iron Lady” had been his role model. He admired her successful leadership and her conviction politics, much of which he later adopted. His “New Labor” party introduced market mechanisms and competition into the rickety National Health Service, and encouraged privatization and outsourcing of government services.

Prime Minister Blair sought out Mrs. Thatcher and asked her for advice when he took office. She told him, among other things, to stay close to the White House no matter who is president. That was one reason why he was not only close to President Clinton, a political soul mate, but also stayed the course with President Bush and became America's closest ally in the “war on terror.”

Tony Blair has been widely ridiculed for being “Bush's poodle,” but he had a two-way relationship with the White House in which he was both a follower and a leader. Mr. Blair is a committed Christian who believes in humanitarian intervention in foreign affairs. In 1999, he strongly encouraged President Clinton to use force to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. And when he followed the United States into Iraq, he insists he did so because he believed it was “the right thing to do.” The fact that the vast majority of his fellow citizens disagreed with him did not deter him.

From that moment on, Mr. Blair's political future, like that of Mr. Bush, was inextricably linked to success or failure in Iraq. Pundits now say that this was Tony Blair's greatest mistake. Mr. Blair would insist, as he did on the day he announced his resignation, that it was an honest mistake. I leave it to the historians to decide. As always, they will have the last word.