TONY BLAIR has announced that he will stand down as Prime Minister on Wednesday, June 27.

He made the anouncement in a speech to party activists in his Sedgefield constituency after earlier briefing the Cabinet on his plans.

He will remain Prime Minister until the Labour Party elects a new leader - expected to be Gordon Brown.

Mr Blair earlier told the Cabinet he did not want ministers paying tribute to him, adding "that can be left for another day".

Meanwhile, a Kent MP says Mr Blair has succeeded in forcing the Conservatives to pursue Labour policies.

Chatham and Aylesford MP Jonathan Shaw, a Government whip, said the measure of Tony Blair’s success after ten years as Prime Minister was that the Conservatives under David Cameron had changed tack on key policies.

"You are now seeing a Conservative party actively pursuing our agenda. They now claim to support public services, the minimum wage and workers’ rights.

"And if anyone had predicted ten years ago they would support our policy on civil partnerships, they would not have been believed," said the MP, who was among the eight in Kent first elected in 1997.

He denied the decision to go to war on Iraq would overshadow other achievements. "I don’t think he will shy away from that decision and people will see that in the context of other things he has done."

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Fellow Kent Labour MP Derek Wyatt said Gordon Brown would adopt a different approach to running the country but denied the Chancellor lacked the popular appeal that had enabled Labour under Tony Blair to make inroads into previously Conservative strongholds like Kent.

Mr Wyatt, MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey, said: "Brown does not seek the limelight; he’s a very different politician and it will take people a while to get used to him.

"If he can take the initiative on Iraq and Afghanistan and if there is a new focus on what the country needs, not what Blair needs, then I think it would make people pause before backing the Conservatives."

But there was a characteristically withering assessment from the long-standing Thanet North Conservative MP Roger Gale.

He said: "Blair is orchestrating his exit via a short cabinet meeting, photo opportunity, flight to Durham and announcement to his party faithful, to try to put a shine on the end of a disastrous third term of premiership.

"Nothing, though, can conceal that this electoral decade, which began with great promise and popular hope, has terminated in the shroud of Iraq and with the cloud of the "Cash for Peerages" scandal hanging over the Prime Minister."

Kent Messenger Group political editor Paul Francis writes: It is 10 years since Tony Blair hailed Labour’s historic election victory by proclaiming that a new dawn had broken.

But the heady days of 1997 are long past.

We want you to give us your verdict on Tony’s 10 years in charge of the country and how his government has affected Kent.

Have schools improved or got worse. What about our hospitals? Is the NHS safe?

Perhaps you are a parent of a soldier fighting in Iraq. Are you a pensioner who feels Labour has left you worse off or improved your lot?

And what about Mr Blair’s impact on Kent? Before 1997, the county had no Labour MPs. For the last decade it has had eight. Has the government delivered for the county? What do you think about the huge house-building programme?