Blair and the Labour succession

Everyone else in the British blogosphere (an example, at random) and the UK media (example here) is rabbiting on incessantly, trying to read the tea leaves of when Blair may hand over to a successor as leader of the Labour Party and therefore Prime Minister.

All very interesting of course. However, not very productive. I have mixed views about Blair - he made Labour electable (boo!) by seeming to dampen down (hurrah!) the wilder excesses of socialism (boo!) which had rendered the party unelectable (hurrah!). From a traditional Labour perspective (boo!) he followed US President 'dubya' Bush into Afghanistan and Iraq, getting rid of odiously tyrannical regimes in the process (hurrah!). He helped Labour to ditch Clause 4 (hurrah!), but gave us a Chancellor who has presided over a huge transfer of resources from the productive parts of the economy to the unproductive by use of crude redistributive policies (boo!).

Do I want Blair to remain as PM? No. Do I relish the prospect of a Brown, or a Reid, or a Milliband, or a Johnston becoming PM to replace him? No. Labour itself, mercifully, has become tired and jaded and needs to give way to another party, possibly a re-invigorated Conservative party under David Cameron. That is the ONLY topic which interests me. The present little local difficulty concerning Blair and Labour's internal and petty party politics is mere political fluff - I am happy to leave obsessing about it to others.