Curiously enough, Britain got the result it wanted. The return of Tony Blair to 10 Downing Street with a much reduced parliamentary majority was not an option against which voters could mark a cross on the ballot paper. Yet by some mysterious act of collective telepathy, when the many millions of individual choices were aggregated they delivered the outcome closest to the national mood.

Mr Blair has won his historic third term - a feat in modern times matched only by Margaret Thatcher's run of victories during the 1980s. Yet the prime minister was humbled. His majority in the House of Commons had been cut by nearly 100 seats. The voters had punished him for his friendship with George W. Bush and for the decision to send British troops to Iraq. Still admired as a leader, Mr Blair discovered that the controversy about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and about the legal grounds for war had exhausted his stock of trust.