Reply #6: He is a smart, skilled politician.

[BruceMcF]

And he does give a good facsimile of having a good heart ... that being one of the skills.

However, his foreign policy strategy of increasing the leverage of the UK by cozying up to Washington, which seemed to be working so well as the US geared up to invade Afghanistan, ran up against an obstinate White House determination to invade Iraq, as called for by the neocons (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612">who have now abandoned the WH as being too incompetent to implement their brilliant plans).

On the biggest foreign policy decision to face a UK politician in quite a while, whether to enable the US to act as a bull in a china shop or to try to force it to engage with the rest of the Western World, he picked door number 1, and that has made all the difference.