To mark Tony Blair's departure as Britain's prime minister, the Downing Street advisors decided that he should make a farewell trip around this sceptred isle in a lap of honor, giving "real people", as politicians like to refer to them, a chance to say thank you and get their backs patted and shoulders squeezed.

Later the trip was planned to stay the same - hospitals, schools, nature, hugs and so on - but he'd do Africa instead. Africa, it was thought, would be more sympathetic, grateful.

After 10 years of economic growth, social ease, gently rising aspiration, cultural exuberance, financial security, dropping unemployment, manageable taxes and record spending on education and health, 10 years in which the biggest disturbances had been over fox hunting, Blair has managed to get himself roundly, fundamentally, panoramically hated at home.

Tony is a personable man who has worked very, very hard on being liked. He is by his own admission a people person, a straight kind of guy, and he'd done his best. But it counts for naught. He'll leave office well and truly loathed, mocked and despised.

However he's in good company. Margaret Thatcher was as viscerally hated at home as she was warmly respected abroad. Winston Churchill himself, consistently voted Greatest Englishman Ever in popularity polls, was precipitously voted out of office at the first opportunity, even before World War II. Clement Atlee was in turn kicked out at the next election, having given the nation the foremost socially splendid political years of the century, including the welfare state, nationalized utilities, nuclear defense and independence for India.

There's no pleasing the British, or winning their favor. They simply hate politicians. All politicians. Hatred goes with politicians like mint sauce with lamb. It's as old as Parliaments.

The Duke of Wellington, vanquisher of Napoleon, most respected and regarded man in Europe, foolishly allowed himself to be made prime minister and became instantly reviled. He was once assaulted by a mob on Waterloo Day, and another time a crowd broke every window in his home, a house that, incidentally, a grateful nation had just given him.

It is an old Anglo aphorism that all political lives end in tragedy. Blair can take consolation from the plain truth that hatred of politicians is a plebian constant, irrespective of party, sex, race, creed or coiffure.

Hatred of authority figures and rule-makers might all be an amusing part of the national character, the collective DNA - a Falstaffian, trenchant, robust skepticism to be admired, if it hadn't grown so destructive and so intimidating.

The difference between British politics and American is that you maintain a collective respect for the office, if not the holder. None of the great offices of the British state carries a residual reverence. The prime minister is not the embodiment of the state, like the American president.

All the opinion polls done for the last generation have shown that disaffection with British politics is a constant.

Blair has flung a final whingeing, Parthian speech over his shoulder, blaming the press for everything, calling it "a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits".

The famously beastly Brit press has predictably bitten back, pointing out that, in retrospect, they should have been a deal more beastly about the run-up to the Iraq War.

The reasons the British hate their politicians are complex, lazy and sadistic. It's partly tradition, a tribal vendetta passed down at the breakfast table over the bills.

And hatred is endemic in the system. The adversarial nature of Parliament encourages constant bullying, bickering and pathetic point-scoring, which is infuriating to watch and does little to draw attention to the differences between legislators and parties.

The British parsimoniously pay their politicians just enough to attract dull, self-important drones, but not enough to compete with business or finance.

And there aren't enough meaningful jobs to give a sense of achievement or public service, so politicians mooch about tea rooms, plotting and nursing bitter resentment, smelling of failure and making themselves hateful.

Source: China Daily/Agencies