Why Blair's legacy of achievements will always be overshadowed by Iraq

THE sun shines on Sedgefield, and the B1278 runs like a silver ribbon through the green and gently undulating constituency.

The road connects the prosperous merchant town of Sedgefield - tall Queen Anne houses and flowery tea shops - with the former mining village of Fishburn and its tight terraces and small corner shops.

Over the course of the decade that the road's local MP has been PM, the B1278 has changed enormously. And, in terms of bricks and mortar, it has changed enormously for the better.

But behind those bricks and mortar?

As the road gears itself up to leave Sedgefield, it passes signposts pointing to what was, ten years ago, a bog standard comprehensive school which was officially "underachieving".

Only 26 per cent of pupils got five or more A to C grades in GCSE exams.

Today, the signposts point to Sedgefield Community College, "a specialist sports college...supported by HSBC, the world's local bank", where 72.3 per cent of pupils receive five top grades. It is one of the most improving schools in the county, and 96 per cent of its pupils go into some form of higher education.

This alone represents a turnaround in aspiration. Three-quarters of the school's pupils come from coalfield areas where previous generations of children were regarded as fodder for, first, the pits and then, the dole queues.

Headteacher Lynne Ackland puts the change down - partly at least - to the sports status the Government granted the college five years ago.

"Some people were appalled that we were even thinking of applying for sports college status, and wanted something more loftier like maths or business," she says. "But it's not really about sport at all. It was about bringing the different communities - the ex-mining and cokeworks communities and the more affluent Sedgefield village - together and instilling a sense of identity that you get through sport."

The college's application, supported by £10,000 from HSBC, enabled it to access £90,000-a-year additional Government money to improve its sports facilities. It has also brought a specialism to south Durham that other schools in the area can access, just as Sedgefield students now use the technology or business specialisms to be found in schools in Newton Aycliffe or Durham City.

"There are so many different courses for students that no one institution can offer them all, so now all the schools have to work together," she says.

Next year, work will begin on completely rebuilding the college under the Building Schools for the Future programme.

"I don't think we have ever had it so good," says the headteacher. "It's still not wonderful, and we will always be wanting more resources. But people forget what it was like before: the cuts, the redundancies, the values akin to the Victorian age. It was bleak."

As if to reinforce her words, the next big complex along the road is Turner's motor showroom. Perhaps more impressive than the five acres of gleaming cars and caravans is the roadside sign: "Wanted. night-time controllers." A couple of nearby pubs also have signs on the counter asking for staff - three decades ago, as the last of the mines closed, this area was bedevilled by long-term unemployment. Now there are long-term vacancies.

The B1278 comes to a roundabout on which stands the £8m Sedgefield Community Hospital, opened in 2003 by the local MP. It replaced the 16 prefabricated "huts" which had been erected further down the B1278 in 1941 as an emergency military hospital to look after evacuees from Dunkirk. The "huts" had been built to last a decade. A campaign to replace them had begun after three decades but it didn't bear fruit until six decades had passed.

"It is fantastic," says Dr Peter Jones, head of the GP practice which looks after 15,500 patients in the area. "I've just admitted an 86-year-old miner who fell out of bed and has a suspected fracture. If that hospital didn't exist, he would have been sent to casualty at Darlington where, in the old days, he could have waited four hours in a corridor.

"That's the good news. The bad news is that the hospital has been built by PFI (Private Finance Initiative) which seems to me to be paying on the never-never."

The bad news - if that is what it is - gets worse. A new diagnostic suite with all manner of clever scanning machines is planned for the site. The word in Sedgefield is that it will be privately built, privately financed and privately run. This is typical of the way the local MP has encouraged a blurring of the boundaries between the public and private sectors.

But does the 86-year-old miner care whose money is providing the care which to him is free?

"Ten years ago, waiting lists were 18 months; now they are almost 18 weeks," says Dr Jones, who was sponsored on one of his bicycle expeditions by the local MP. "I've a friend who had an angioplasty done within 24 hours at the James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough, and you now get a two-week diagnosis for cancer, which is extraordinary. It is down to investment and to managers sorting out the processes."

There are, of course, frustrations. There are many junior doctors - some of them trained in the new arm of Durham University, in Stockton - who will be without a job in September; there has been all sorts of expensive renaming and reshaping of the trusts and authorities which run the NHS. In Sedgefield itself, there no longer an NHS dentist.

"But we do have at least two 100-year-olds and our patients are living longer," says Dr Jones. "To the Government's credit, we've had a ban on cigarette advertising, nicotine replacement therapy is now free and on July 1, the smoking ban will take effect."

Over the roundabout from the hospital is the site of Winterton, a Victorian lunatic asylum. Ten years ago, it was derelict. Today, it has "300 units" on it: smart family homes with a Gothic feel and unusual designer details. Prices start at £120,000 for a flat and rise to £315,000 for five bedrooms.

"There are a lot of incomers on Winterton Park Estate," says Carole Franks, of Dowen's estate agents. "You can travel everywhere from Sedgefield: Teesside, Durham, Darlington, Newcastle." This, though, is forcing out those trying to get onto the property ladder.

"First-time buyers tend to go to Fishburn and then hope to work their way back in," says Carole. The local MP said at his last monthly press conference that prices in Fishburn average £150,000, but a terrace can still be found for less than £80,000.

Some Winterton Park Estate residents will be looking to work at NetPark, which is a couple of hundred yards along the B1278. It is the future. It is a couple of ultra-modern office complexes in which scientists create things like flexible computer screens and direct writing.

One day, it will rival the cokeworks and collieries which once lined this road as a mass-employer. Within four years, 1,000 people will work here, but at the moment, the cyclepaths are unused and the cars belonging to the 61 full-time workers are out-numbered by rooks on the undeveloped field.

"We've got to make sure that local people get those proper jobs and are not just cleaning the windows," warns a local Labour activist.

From NetPark, the B1278 drops down to where a 64-bed private mental hospital - providing 210 jobs and pumping £7m a year into the local economy - is planned. Its neighbour will be the new private elderly care home, which replaced a county council one in Fishburn. The local MP has blurred the line between private and public almost completely.

Over the Skerne skips the road, and pulls itself up the hill into Fishburn. In the first terrace, a couple businesses have opened recently that are surprising for an ex-mining community that's supposed to be fading away. There's a professional guitar tuition shop. There's Iron Maiden, an ironing service which Fishburn's besuited yuppies must use, and in the pet shop trade is so brisk the lady behind the counter doesn't have time to talk.

"I remember the shellsuit era before he came to power," says John Burton, the local councillor who doubles as agent to the local MP. "People were down-hearted. They weren't working and it showed on their faces."

It's strange. No one in Sedgefield knows what to call their local MP. "Tony" sounds boastful, as if they know him personally; "Mr Blair" is far too formal. So even John Burton - who has been with the local MP every step of the way since he got him selected as Labour candidate in 1983 - skirts awkwardly around the name.

"His legacy will be that places like Fishburn are far better off, from standards of education for the young to the winter fuel payments for pensioners," he says. "The minimum wage and child allowance have all changed people's lives for the better."

The estate agent doesn't disagree. "Fishburn's improved a lot because of the new build and the bigger properties. It used just to be locals who bought there, but now people are some coming into the area because you get a lot of house for your money."

The local vicar, the Reverend Martin King, who retired from St Edmund's, in Sedgefield, three years ago, doesn't disagree. "I don't feel that there as many people who are as badly off, although those at the bottom of the heap are now further at the bottom - I've had to bury two young people who got into difficulties with cocaine." (There are five heroin addicts registered with the local GP, whereas ten years ago there were none.)

The local headteacher doesn't disagree. "We have noticed that the area is getting more prosperous - more kids have access to computers, things like that," she says.

But then we come to the elephant that doesn't just sit in the middle of the B1278, it hovers over it in a helicopter gunship. Lynne Ackland recalls the day in 2003 when the local MP brought his new friend, the President of the United States, to visit the college. "It was the most fantastic day ever," she says. "But we did have to square the circle over Iraq. We said to parents that if they felt strongly about the war, they could keep their kids at home. Only three did - and one of those 'escaped' and came in anyway."

That was four years ago. Two years ago, when Reg Keys - whose soldier son had been killed in Iraq - stood against the local MP, he received plenty of sympathy on the doorstep, but not many votes in the ballot box. In fact, the local MP increased his majority.

Now, as the conflict drags on intractably, the mood has changed completely.

Dr Jones says almost wistfully: "He could have been one of the greatest prime ministers this country has ever seen - apart from the war.

"I'm sure it wasn't an easy decision to take, but he took the wrong one. It was morally wrong, legally wrong, strategically wrong and politically wrong."

Mr King is deeply troubled. He was vicar in Middleton St George when he first met the local MP in 1983 - "there was no way you could be anything other than impressed", he recalls.

"At that time, working with vulnerable people was very difficult - tramps came to the door, and you knew that that week another rug had been pulled from under them by the Government. When he got into No 10, there was a tremendous sense of relief among us, it was extraordinary."

Mr King said prayers at the baptism of the local MP's fourth child, Leo, in the Roman Catholic church in Sedgefield. He was also on the green in Sedgefield demonstrating against President George Bush's visit.

"They have loused up two countries and the surrounding region and made the world an unsafer place," he says. "He has this willingness to sacrifice so many lives and go on and on and on doing it..."

It is not just the bloodshed that makes the vicar doubt the local MP's Christianity. It's the dodgy dossier and the spin that took the country to war.

"There is no doubt that when you see someone stand up and tell lies, you can't take their word for anything anymore, and that's a major, major shame," he says.

John Burton is loyally supportive. "He deserves to be remembered for peace in Ireland where hundreds of people were killed and the economy devastated," he says. "Kosovo and Afghanistan, where the Taliban beheaded women, were a success. Sierra Leone was a success.

"Over Iraq, he is convinced it was the right thing to do, and in the future people will look back and say that it has played its part in solving the Middle East.

"I said to him at the beginning that the easiest thing for him to do was to do nothing. He said: 'I can't.' The Russian and French secret services were saying the same things about weapons of mass destruction as our intelligence. He felt he had to do something."

A poll last week said that 61 per cent of people in the country think Tony Blair has been a good Prime Minister, but 69 per cent think he will be remembered for the war in Iraq.

"His Labour Government has done a lot of good things, but his personal legacy has been ruined," says Mr King.

This, then, is the first write of history. The good things line the B1278, but the elephant in the helicopter gunship overshadows them all.