Who said books are dead? Did he blog or tweet, video or iPad? No, Tony Blair wanted to get a message across, so he wrote a book. He smeared the black stuff on trees, stitched it together and made people go out to buy it. Good for him.

Blair's mildly engaging stream of auto-eroticism shows him memoirising much as he ruled. He uses the first person singular a million times. He stages everything. He fixes on a theme and controls the narrative. The intention is to smother an Iraq apologia in endless quotables on Gordon Brown and his emotional idiocy and general hopelessness. It is cruel, but has worked a dream.

Blair was a politician of great talent, and a miserable prime minister. The service he did his country was considerable, but it was done by the time he took office in 1997. It was to anaesthetise the Labour party while he turned it into a vehicle to make him electable and his newly espoused Thatcherism irreversible, much as Attlee had made welfarism irreversible in 1945. The British left is still in denial on the subject.

When the Social Democratic party was formed in 1981, an ambitious young Blair abused them as "middle-aged, middle-class erstwhile Labour", with only "lingering social consciences [to] prevent them voting Tory". When, a year later, Anthony Blair fought Beaconsfield, he was for CND, against Trident and for withdrawal from Europe. (None of this is in his memoir.)

When Blair arrived in parliament in 1983, he was eloquent in defence of clause IV renationalisation: "not a question of reinterpreting it … but a question of giving effect to it". There should be no curb on trade union rights, and privatisation should be abandoned "here, now and for ever". When Nigel Lawson cut income tax to 40%, Blair demanded Labour increase it to 60%.

By the end of the 80s, ambition had worked a wondrous change. Blair abandoned nuclear disarmament and subscribed to the EU. As employment spokesman, he declared that Thatcher's union laws should stay. He did a U-turn on privatisation. Unlike Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Brown, Blair saw himself as classless and placeless, at ease in Thatcher's world. He travelled to the US with Brown and, like De Tocqueville, returned mesmerised, in particular by Clinton's use of political charisma.

When he became leader, Blair's self-styled "project" dared not speak its Thatcherite name, but it understood that success could lie only in capturing the middle ground, in the "electoral necessity of bourgeois ascendancy". New Labour should hang loose, talking about right and wrong, individual choice, community not state. Blair himself was unashamedly rightwing, espousing the nuclear deterrent and telling a police conference that "if we dare not speak the language of punishment then we deny the real world".

Such idealism in a prince, as Machiavelli pointed out, was useless without power. Blair's memoir is as its self-regarding best in recounting how he re-engineered the Labour party so it could never again undermine its leader, as it had Gaitskell, Wilson and Callaghan. Where previous prime ministers had struggled to bend a monolithic party to their will, Blair set out to smash it.

In 1996 Blair wrote that unions should have "no special or privileged place" in his party. "We will not be held to ransom by the unions. We will stand up to strikes," he assured the Sun, and he meant it. The bloc vote should go; the party conference should lose power over the manifesto; the national executive should be divorced from the shadow cabinet; even the holy of holies, clause IV, should evaporate.

The party was torn to shreds as Blair scored victory after victory against "old Labour". He turned a 19th-century movement into a 21st-century presidential machine, puffed up with candyfloss vacuities such as "traditional values in a changed world". Blair's appetite for cliche was, and is, gargantuan.

Blair never criticised Thatcher. In 1995 he lauded her as "a radical, not a Tory". He told the New York Times that Labour would be "unelectable" if it dismantled Thatcherism, one of the things "the 1980s got right". The lady returned the compliment, remarking during the 1997 election that he was "a man who won't let Britain down". She was the first VIP – before any Labour figure – whom Blair invited to Downing Street. He was obsessed by her good opinion, like Odysseus panting at the sirens' call but blocking his colleagues' ears.

In office Blair was a true fundamentalist. He adored Thatcher's policies on law and order, refusing penal reform. He carried privatisation far beyond what she had tolerated, fuelled by his affection for high finance and private wealth. He mimicked Thatcher's belligerence in foreign affairs, loving to be thought "not wobbly". Even his "regrets" have a Thatcherite tinge: the foxhunting ban and freedom of information.

The left's refusal to accept what Blair did to Labour is reminiscent of the Whig acceptance of reform in the 1830s. When Britain is experiencing radical change, it prefers to look the other way. Blair's conversion was so deft that his party bought the Thatcher ticket hook, line and sinker, but on the strict understanding that it was not mentioned.

Needless to say, little of this is in Blair's book, though he does let slip a tribute to Thatcher's "character, leadership and intelligence" in smashing the unions. One reason must be that, while Blair understood Thatcherism's potency, he was blind to its shortcomings. He grasped the essence of his creed but could not see how to take it forward.

Not for three decades has anyone in Britain charted a proper boundary between the public and private sectors. Blair noted that in 1997 Thatcher's public sector was "largely unreformed" and that, had Attlee returned, "he would have greeted it as an old friend". Yet he did nothing. He could change Labour ruthlessly, but quailed before the gods of public administration. This was despite having turned Downing Street into a furnace of centralised power. He and Brown tipped unprecedented quantities of money into the pockets of public servants, yet the quality of Britain's schools, hospitals and social services remains shocking.

Blair blames much of this failure on Brown, but the failure was Blair's. He left Brown in charge, with his co-architect of madness, Ed Balls – who without apology now thinks himself equipped to run the country. Blair never had the guts to sack either of them. As a result, one of the brightest sparks to cross the political firmament since the war can emit only a long wail of impotence.

Perhaps Blair is right, that Brown was his nemesis, a tragedy collapsed across the path of history. If so, a duo that could have created so much, and yet created so little, is just another might-have-been.