Tony Blair’s long goodbye as British Prime Minister ended yesterday as he formally resigned and turned over power to Gordon Brown.

An enormous amount has been written about his decade-long tenure at No. 10 Downing Street, and historians will no doubt spend the next several decades sifting over his record and debating it.

While they will be concerned with the decision to go to war with Iraq, the Northern Ireland peace process, the success and failure of Mr. Blair’s policies on domestic issues like health and education and to what degree Mr. Blair was responsible for the prosperity that Britain has enjoyed in recent years, it is likely that the Blair Government’s influence over Bermuda will get little or no attention.

But Bermudians should take an interest in the question, especially as the debate over Independence continues to simmer. It is also worth pondering what changes are likely now that Gordon Brown is Prime Minister.

There can be no doubt that the major change in policy concerned the grant of British citizenship and passports to Bermudians. This was initiated by Mr. Blair’s first Foreign Secretary, the late Robin Cook, and was brought to fruition under his successor, Jack Straw.

It was an important and correct change, which took Bermuda and the inhabitants of the other Overseas Territories out of the limbo in which their citizenship had hung for decades and gave young people in particular opportunities for education and work and life experience which they would otherwise never had enjoyed.

Although it may not have been the primary intent, it has also dealt a blow to Independence movements here and elsewhere, because it provides an eminently practical birthright which is difficult to surrender — especially on behalf of generations of yet unborn Bermudians.

In tandem with this, it seems clear that the Blair Government has made heavier demands on the governments of the Overseas Territories to improve standards of governance and transparency than was the case in the past. Ironically, and the Foreign Office position paper on Overseas Territories re-released this week seems to make this clear, at the same time that the UK has devolved more powers to local governments, it is demanding more activism on the part of Governors to ensure that governance is good and that they exercise their reserved powers responsibly.

On the whole, that position paper seems to be aimed more at some of the Overseas Territories in the Caribbean than it is at Bermuda, but the message is still clear. If Britain becomes concerned that local governments are not acting in the best residents of their citizens, they will not hesitate to say so.

That is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Clearly Bermudians would and should be concerned if the British Government started interfering with the general will of the people or with legitimate actions of the Government. But there should be some reassurance for the general public that if — and it is important to emphasis if — the Bermuda Government failed to act transparently or began to erode basic rights and freedoms, that the British Government would act.

On other issues, the Blair government record is not so good. This newspaper continues to believe that Bermuda erred in turning over the Base clean-up negotiations to the British Government, which did not get as good a deal as it ought to have done.

It is difficult to know precisely what opinions Mr. Brown has on Britain’s overseas territories, but it seems unlikely that there will be any major changes in policy.

What will certainly happen today is a Cabinet shuffle that will inevitably result in changes in the ranks of junior Ministers. So Bermuda could well find itself with a new Foreign Secretary and a new junior Minister with responsibility for Bermuda. Just who Mr. Brown selects for those posts will help to signal his interests and intentions.