The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, said yesterday he wanted history to see his administration as a "great, radical, reforming government" leading a "quiet revolution".
Introducing his government's first annual report, he said Labour could be genuinely proud of progress on delivering its election promises "line by line".
He spoke in the Downing Street garden to his ministerial team, picked earlier this week in a reshuffle Mr Blair said had strengthened the government team and given it more strategic focus. Whatever the "froth and nonsense" which sometimes dominated the media, the government would stay focused on important issues which were relevant long-term, he said.
"This is a radical reforming government. Sometimes the revolution is a quiet revolution, but a revolution nevertheless it is. It is, and remains for me, a tremendous privilege and honour to lead what I hope in retrospect and in history will be seen as one of the great radical reforming governments of our time."
Mr Blair set out his government's progress on its 177 manifesto commitments and the 10point contract he made with voters at the election.
Of progress in Northern Ireland, he welcomed the decision of the people there to say Yes to the Belfast Agreement, Yes to the assembly, Yes to democracy, Yes to peace. "Nothing has been worth more time and effort, nothing could be more worthwhile than what we have achieved in Northern Ireland."
The document cost £95,000 and has been compared to a company's annual report to shareholders. Later, Mr Blair went to the West Midlands to be questioned on the report by the public.
The Tory party said he should have made his report to parliament where they could challenge him. Earlier the Tory leader, Mr William Hague, dismissed the report as a work of fiction masking a string of broken promises and wasting taxpayers' money. "If anyone's putting it in their library, they'd better plonk it in the section marked fiction," he said. "Letting this government write its own annual report is a bit like leaving Burke and Hare in charge of a cemetery."
In his speech Mr Blair said a stable economy was fundamental to the "third way" philosophy. The government had had to take tough action to get the economy back on track, ending the cycle of boom and bust, and productivity must be improved by tackling long-term weaknesses by investing in education, science and infrastructure.
He had brought in a "necessary and deliberate" slowdown of the economy to ensure its long-term health, and the challenge of the next year was to manage that slowdown "without bringing it to a shuddering halt".
Turning to the annual report, Mr Blair said: "We can be genuinely proud, all of us, to learn that of those 177 [manifesto commitments], 50 have been met, 119 are under way. Only eight have yet to be timetabled.
"That is a good start for just 15 months. But there is a lot more hard work to be done in the remainder of this parliament."
He pledged that the government would learn from its mistakes but, clearly stung by claims that his government is image-obsessed, he wrote: "Critics say this government is more concerned with style than substance, more intent on short-term popularity than with what is right.
"In a year of welfare reform, an agreement in Northern Ireland, two substantial budgets, a comprehensive review of spending and constitutional reform that charge is unsustainable."