The most boring thing about the attacks on Tony Blair is their predictability, their intellectual laziness. Blair, we are told, is a man of shadow without substance.

When Blair took over the leadership of the Labour Party from the late John Smith, various attempts to belittle him were made by armchair Socialists and sundry country gentlemen of The Daily Telegraph persuasion.

First of all the latter called him Bambi, after the Disney cartoon animal. Bambi Blair was a sham, the world was told, a leader without any iron in his soul or steel in his will. The Labour Party would soon implode from Blair attempts to reform it.

Then out went the old Clause IV from Labour's constitution. In a few months Bambi had achieved what successive Labour leaders since Hugh Gaitskell had tried and failed to do: drag the party kicking and screaming out of the past. Overnight Bambi the spineless wonder became Stalin the hard-hearted autocrat.

The best one was still to come. During the election campaign, Bambi Stalin was likened unto the Devil himself. Remember those slitty red eyes glowing like a torturer's hot coals in a Peter Breughal painting? What a progress: in less than three years the helpless forest fawn had made the long day's journey into night and become the Prince of Darkness.

Fearing they might have gone too far and made Blair interesting, the Tories' election high command ordered one of their famous about-turns and for the last week or so of the campaign, the Prime Minister-in-waiting became Blair the Bland.

The likes of Rory Bremner could have had fun with these intellectually- bankrupt attempts by artery-hardened Daily Telegraph loyalists to diminish a great man to their own size. Instead he's taken the easy route of impersonation; what could have been telling satire has become predictable caricature of physical mannerisms.

Lesser lights trot along behind, vainly trying to draw attention to themselves while Bambi goes to Northern Ireland and the Middle East and argues for peace and reconciliation.

Was it Stalin or Satan who, in the space of three years, turned the ungovernable Labour Party into the party of government?

And was it Mr Bland who announced the wholesale reform of the Welfare State and sailed right into the resulting storm, in part whipped up by disgruntled armchair Socialists?

Which Blair was it behind the high-risk referenda in Scotland and Wales which will bring much-needed constitutional reform? Whose government banned the sale of handguns and introduced freedom-of-information legislation into Parliament?

Who embraced the European Social Chapter with its 48-hour maximum working week and invested an additional £3 billion to £3.5 billion in Britain's battered education and health services?

Nope, Blair or Bambi or Satan, has done absolutely nothing of consequence since last May - except to turn Britain into a fake nation of sentimentalists snivelling at the death of a self-centred obsessive called Diana, Princess of Wales. Thus Blair's snipers join forces with the Tory think tank which last week traduced this country so comprehensively.

What the Social Affairs Unit was really up to, of course, was attempting to undermine Blair by finding absolutely nothing good to say about the society he had taken over, presumably after 18 glorious years of Thatcherism when society did not exist.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.