Too soon to judge Blair

This is the third biography of Tony Blair to be published, the fourth if you count the passionate philippic written by the ex-Labour MP, Leo Abse. But those books first came out eight or nine years ago. So it is high time we got a further full-length portrait of the Prime Minister in office.

In many ways, Anthony Seldon's door-stopper of a volume - the text alone comes to 700 pages - fits the bill. True, the author has adopted an unorthodox approach. Instead of a straight narrative he offers an essentially episodic treatment - 20 chapters on key events in Blair's career and 20 on those individuals (including God) who have most influenced him.

As a biographical technique it can certainly claim novelty but it also exposes vulnerabilities. In essence, each chapter is a separate, stand-alone essay and this leads the author, who had a team of three researchers working for him, into some muddled chronology, not to say a fair amount of tiresome repetition.

Yet this unusual biography still presents a vivid enough likeness of its subject, although one that is unlikely to prove popular at No 10. Seldon's last similar work was an authorised study of John Major but this one has "unauthorised" stamped all over it (this is true even of its source notes, which are so unrevealing as to be worthless).

Its main contention is that Blair has signally failed to live up to all the expectations and hopes that he evoked back in 1997 and, insofar as it possesses a consistent thread, it is one of enquiring into what went wrong.

Its author, when he is not moonlighting as a writer, is headmaster of Brighton College and he shows himself a dab hand at detecting personality flaws and character defects. He is probably correct in seeing in the very strengths that made Blair a success as party leader the corresponding weaknesses that have led to his relative failure as Prime Minister.

There are two types of Prime Minister: those who merely want to be in office and those who are determined actually to do something once they get the job. Macmillan, Wilson and Major all belong in the first category, while Attlee, Heath and Thatcher, in their different ways, embody the second. If the jury is still out on Blair, this book does a good deal to explain why.

Seldon is certainly not afraid of being critical. He is particularly harsh over Iraq, accusing the Prime Minister of having tipped his hand far too early to the Americans and thus forfeiting any slender chance he had of influencing and shaping events.

He also makes the shrewd point that Blair is prone to self-delusion. He never had a catinhell's chance of getting President Chirac and Chancellor Schroöder to support a second UN resolution but - such was his belief in his own powers of persuasion - he persisted in believing that he could.

And the same spirit of Pollyanna optimism would seem to have gone for his one-time conviction that he could get the Labour Party to love Peter Mandelson.

Of course, in politics few judgments are ever final and it is too early for anyone - even Gordon Brown - to write Blair's epitaph. He may well win the next election but that by itself will not redeem his record in office.

His mentor Roy Jenkins probably got it right when, a year before his protégé became Prime Minister, he likened him to "a man with a very large, utterly priceless crystal bowl condemned to walk miles and miles down slippery passages". He's still walking and hasn't dropped the bowl yet. But his grip on it has never looked less secure.