There was hardly a dry eye in the house when Tony Blair bade farewell to the Labor Party with a bravura performance at its annual conference in Manchester on Tuesday. But they were crocodile tears.

The truth is that his Labor colleagues forced Mr. Blair into announcing a premature departure over his support for Israel against Hezbollah. Just how premature, we do not know, but he has promised to resign by this time next year. And that is still too soon.

Think of it: A Prime Minister at the height of his powers, respected around the world by friend and foe, is obliged to leave office only two years after he was re-elected with a healthy majority. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Most of the attention this week has focused on the relationship between Mr. Blair and the man who has been waiting to take over for 12 years: Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. As the co-architect of New Labor, the makeover that made Labor electable, and of the economic policies that made Labor re-electable, Mr. Brown resents the fact that he has had to play second fiddle to Mr. Blair.

This week, however, it was painfully obvious to everyone why it had been Mr. Blair and not Mr. Brown who had led Labor to three successive election victories. Mr. Blair has charisma and charm; Mr. Brown has all the charisma of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster and the charm of Lon Chaney’s hunchback of Notre Dame.

When Mr. Blair said this week that politics “is about being a fully paid-up member of the human race,” everyone listening involuntarily thought of Mr. Brown, and shuddered. When Mr. Blair praised ministers who had accepted demotion “without bitterness,” it was hard not to think of Gordon “the Incredible Sulk” Brown.

One of the more printable quotes about Mr. Brown by those who have had to work with him was the phrase “control freak” used recently by former Cabinet colleague Charles Clarke. Using the Treasury’s power of the purse strings, Mr. Brown has tried to control not only the government but also the governed.

Mr. Blair needs Mr. Brown, but would dearly like to have fired him. By tradition, the Chancellor of the Exchequer lives next door to the Prime Minister on Downing Street. The Blairs have come to loathe their neighbor.

So there was poetic justice in the fact that Mr. Brown’s big speech — billed as the “speech of a lifetime” — was overshadowed by a single comment muttered by Mr. Blair’s wife, Cherie, as she watched on TV while on walkabout. A young Bloomberg journalist heard her respond to Mr. Brown’s hollow claim that it had been a “privilege” to serve alongside Tony Blair: “Well, that’s a lie.”

Despite the denials, the damage was done. What Mrs. Blair was said to have said was, of course, true: Mr. Brown was lying. And since he had departed from his usual litany of achievements to boast about the values of honesty and hard work he had inherited from his father, a Presbyterian minister, Mrs. Blair’s criticism hit home.

In his own speech the next day, Mr. Blair decided to make a joke about the affair: “I mean, I don’t have to worry about [Cherie] running off with the bloke next door.” It was a good joke, all the better for being risqué, and it went down well — but it also confirmed that she had indeed called Mr. Brown a liar.

The real substance of Mr. Blair’s valedictory address, however, was not about the petty rivalries that have driven him to throw in his hand at an age when neither Thatcher nor Churchill had yet begun their premierships. It was to warn his party and his people not to give up on the war on terror just because they had given up on him.

The centerpiece of his last legislative program will be homeland security, with draconian laws on anti-terrorism and immigration. The home secretary, John Reid, made his name by thwarting the plot to blow up airliners and then telling Muslims face-to-face that they had to guard their children from being groomed to become suicide bombers. Mr. Reid has a reputation as a brute, but most people would rather have a brute as prime minister than Mr. Brown.

When Mr. Blair spoke about the war on terror, he, too, had a message for Muslims: “This terrorism isn’t our fault. We didn’t cause it. It’s not the consequence of foreign policy.” And to non-Muslims he declared: “We will not win until we shake ourselves free of the wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy, that somehow we are the ones responsible.”

The message to both was Churchillian: We will never surrender. “If we retreat now, hand Iraq over to Al Qaeda and sectarian death squads and Afghanistan back to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, we won’t be safer; we will be committing a craven act of surrender that will put our future security in the deepest peril.”

It was the war in Lebanon that turned his party against him over the summer, but he still insists that Hezbollah, not Israel, must take sole responsibility for that war: “We must never again let Lebanon become the battleground for a conflict that neither Israeli nor Lebanese people wanted though it was they who paid the price for it.”

The most sensitive issue for his party, and for the country, is his support for President Bush. “Yes, it’s hard sometimes to be America’s strongest ally,” he admitted. But there was no retreat. To those who wanted to distance Britain from the Bush administration, he had this warning: “You may find it’s a long way back.”

Mr. Blair was not only thinking of the anti-American fanatics of the left, plenty of whom were in his audience. He was also taking very precise aim at his Conservative opponent, whom the opinion polls suggest is most likely to win the next election: David Cameron. This was the prime minister’s first chance to hit back since Mr. Cameron’s speech on the anniversary of 9/11, in which the Tory leader blamed America for anti-Americanism and attacked Mr. Blair for his “slavish” and “uncritical” relationship with Mr. Bush.

Unlike many of his colleagues, who think a Tory victory in 2009 inevitable, Mr. Blair is clearly not afraid of these “liberal Conservative” political hermaphrodites. “My advice: get after them.”

Mr. Blair summed up the opportunism of Cameronian foreign policy: “Pander to anti-Americanism by stepping back from America.” He spoke with the authority of one who has spent a decade at the top when he added the killer punch: “Sacrificing British influence for party expediency is not a policy worthy of a prime minister.”

By the time Mr. Blair had finished, not only many Labor delegates but many of the journalists, too, watching his last conference speech must have wondered why he had to go. It isn’t just that Mr. Blair will be a hard act for his party to follow — he will be a hard act for his country to follow, too.