a PR disaster

'Go back to 1997. Think back. No, really, think back.'

Typically tetchy it may have been, but this line was the highlight of Tony Blair's resignation speech for me.

I remember walking home in the early morning of 2 May 1997. It was a balmy night. I was a student in a seaside town. The Labour landslide was juddering into place, and I was on top of the world.

I still remember that election night as one of the most heady evenings of my life. I had abandoned my ecologically minded housemates, who must have been heartily sick of my exhortations to vote Labour, to spend the evening with my most political friends. Wine was drunk, cigarettes of various degrees of legality were smoked.

We were young, we were dumb, we were up for Portillo.

Cynicism went out the window as seat after seat fell. In retrospect, the only note of sanity was provided by a friend of a friend, recently released from prison, who grumpily told us nothing would change.

Ten years on, it certainly feels as if he was right. Where did it all go wrong? It's easy to blame 9/11 and the Iraq adventure for the nation's disenchantment with Tony, but for me at least political disillusionment set in a lot earlier.

I watched the 2001 election slumped in bed (perhaps an appropriate reaction to having voted Lib Dem for the first and last time). I was lucky to stay awake long enough to hear Mandelson's cringeworthy 'I'm a fighter, not a quitter' speech.

By 2005 I was at my first general election count, tentatively tipping my toe into Green Party activism.

Everybody has their own personal 'I've had it with Blair' moment. For me, it was the decision to renege on electoral reform. The manifesto promise of a referendum on electoral reform was a key ingredient of my post-election euphoria. Even as an avid Labour cheerleader, I believed that proportional representation would transform British politics. Barring some freak of electoral maths, leaving Labour or the Tories dependent on Ming's increasingly unconvincing troops, we're unlikely to find out in a hurry. Labour got greedy, and we all lost out. Thanks, Tony. Now piss off.