BAMBI, they called him. With his youthful energy and his wide-eyed enthusiasm, he was the politician whose only desire was to please. It may have been a nickname coined dismissively, to highlight Tony Blair's inexperience and willingness to follow the prevailing mood, but it also captured the feeling that here was a man who was innocent in the ways of the political jungle. Here was someone we could trust.

No-one calls him Bambi any more. If opinion polls are anything to go by, perhaps Pinnochio would be closer to the mark: the boy who refuses to accept he's been caught out, even when the evidence is as plain as the nose on his face. According to a poll in yesterday's Guardian, more than half of voters believe Mr Blair lied over Iraq.

And yet his Labour Government has a five point lead over the Conservatives. All the signs are that he will lead his party to another landslide victory next year and that he will leave 10 Downing Street at a time of his choosing and not the electorate's. Whatever else he is, he is an election winner.

It was this quality which attracted the Labour Party when, ten years ago today, it chose the Sedgefield MP to be its leader. After 15 years in opposition, and two years after an election Labour expected to win, the time had come when what the party needed above all else was victory.

Once he was elected, beating John Prescott and Margaret Beckett, he began a transformation of the party which was to see it become virtually unrecognisable from the feuding and divided sleeping giant of the previous decade. New Labour was not just a rebranding, it was a whole new way of thinking.

Gone were the debates over ideology and principle. What mattered was whether it would appeal to the electorate and, just as importantly, how it would play in the newspapers. New Labour took the obsession over tomorrow's headlines to a new level, determined not to suffer the tabloid mauling which helped destroy Neil Kinnock's chances of getting to Number Ten, assiduously courting newspaper editors and proprietors.

Alongside this was the hugely symbolic decision to ditch Clause IV, that bedrock of Labour's constitution which committed the party to public ownership of key industries, important not just the electorate that New Labour was different, but in showing the party too.

Characteristically, Mr Blair's conference speech "announcing" the change talked only of renewing the party's foundations; it was left to his aides to explain that Clause IV was for the chop, so avoiding any unsavoury scenes in the conference hall.

For some in the Labour Party, the decision to follow Mr Blair was reluctantly taken, desire for power outweighing misgivings over the march away from socialism. But for many others his arrival injected a new energy and enthusiasm into politics, marking the dawn of a glad, confident morning.

Less than three years after being elected leader, Tony Blair was walking into Downing Street as Prime Minister, having won a landslide victory over John Major's tired and discredited government and amid a widespread expectation that things would, and not just could, only get better.

Seven years on and, albeit after the longest political honeymoon in modern history, it's a different story. We may still prefer him as Prime Minister to the alternatives, but the qualities which attracted us to him in the first place are somewhat tarnished.

When Labour was forced to hand back a £1m donation to Bernie Ecclestone, amid suggestions it was in return for exempting Formula One from a ban on tobacco advertising, the Prime Minister was able to go on television and tell us that we could trust him that nothing untoward had been going on, and we did.

Now Mr Blair is in the unenviable position of knowing trust in him has been eroded to such an extent that it is hard to see how he could ever again take the most important decision a Prime Minister can take: that of sending British soldiers to war. And without this freedom, his authority is severely diminished.

It now seems certain that it is Iraq which will define his career, his decision to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with George Bush altering his relationship with both his party and the people for good.

The war may have split the country - a reality which seemed more of a challenge than a deterrent to the Prime Minister, masochistically defying his reputation as a politician who bends with the public mood - but it is more the way it was sold than the war itself which has caused such disquiet.

He may have been cleared by a series of inquiries, but the bad taste lingers on, threatening to overshadow both his attempts to return the agenda to public services, and the achievements already in place.

And these achievements have been substantial: a stable economy with low inflation and unemployment; a national minimum wage; devolution for Scotland and Wales; extra billions for schools and hospitals; relative calm in Northern Ireland, even if a settlement still seems some way off.

And before Iraq, his international record bore scrutiny: interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone helping avert even greater humanitarian crises, and toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. His dream of taking Britain into the euro may be no closer, and the referendum on a European constitution appears an uphill struggle, but he has brought Britain in from the margins of the EU, even if it is not yet a key player.

But there is still the nagging feeling that the expectations of that May morning seven years ago, and that July three years before that, have not been met, that two landslides should have produced more. True, the first term was hampered by a commitment to stick to Tory spending plans and not to raise taxes, but the fact remains that the hoped-for transformation of society has not taken place.

Billions may have been thrown at public services, but improvements are only now beginning to show, and the suspicion is much of the money has been swallowed by meeting targets and bureaucracy.

In any case, much of the credit for domestic achievements has been claimed by Chancellor Gordon Brown, the undisputed master of the purse strings, leaving the impression that the Prime Minister is shouting ineffectually from the sidelines, pitching in with ideas of frog-marching young ruffians to cashpoints.

Perhaps it is unfair to expect Mr Blair to have led such a revolution; after all, it has been the achievement of few Prime Ministers, only Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher in the post-war era. But committed Labour supporters may have expected a better return from their party's two landslides.

According to "sources close to the Prime Minister" in the Sunday papers, Mr Blair is looking to his third term as the time to effect his sea change, but it is difficult not to see this as a desperate attempt to provide a justification for fighting the next election. A few years ago it was the second term which was meant to be the time to be radical, until Iraq intervened.

There may be a succession of five year plans, but there is no overarching ideology, no principles along which Mr Blair's society is being constructed. The Third Way has fallen by the wayside and there is nothing to take its place. He may be unrivalled as an election winner, but the lack of any clear idea of what to do when he wins prevents him from stamping his mark on history in the same way as Mrs Thatcher.

Perhaps the cartoon character he most resembles is not Bambi after all, but the Road Runner: skilfully - and sometimes luckily - managing to avoid trouble, making his enemies look foolish, determinedly frantic, but never actually going anywhere.