Blair goes, Thatcherism lives on

20 June 2007

In the last days of Blair’s premiership, Simon Jenkins is struck by the stunning resilience of Thatcherite doctrine: in time, New Labour will be seen as nothing but a change of crew

The story of British government is too often read from a stool in Parliament Square or a BBC studio. The physical layout of parliament offers an easy contrast of in and out, left and right, right and wrong. Democracy is a general election, enshrined in a Commons majority. Political reporting is reduced to watching the dramatis personae of Westminster playing musical chairs. This version of elite Britain as essentially a club has not changed since the 18th century. It gives no insight into how the country is run.

Tony Blair was always a maverick, a cuckoo in the Labour nest. A public schoolboy with immense charm, he was Tory by parentage, Social Democrat by instinct and Labour only by marriage. With an ambitious wife, he early applied his people skills to telling Labour’s traditional emperors that they had no clothes. Having not won an election for two decades, they collapsed before him. Between 1992 and 1995, Blair and a small cabal of talented aides reading from the gospel according to Philip Gould destroyed every vestige of Labour pluralism. He smashed the unions, dismantled the national executive and demoted the party conference and membership. It was always Blair’s head (never Brown’s) above the parapet and this was unquestionably his greatest achievement in politics, clearing the ground for his style of Napoleonic leadership. He was the classic Weberian ‘charismatic’, hijacking a semi-defunct party and using it as a vehicle of personal aggrandisement. Denied by the constitution a real presidency, he created a virtual one.

Blair’s ‘project’ was aimed at the one objective of getting himself elected in 1997. He had no great message to bring the world but was convinced that he needed not only to rid himself of the Labour party incubus but also to rid himself of its policies. One by one Blair, with Brown in support, reversed specific party pledges to reverse monetarism, undo Thatcher’s union reforms, renationalise privatised utilities and end means testing. To win over the right-wing press Blair even turned Eurosceptic, with a series of bombastic columns in the Sun. When Blair and Alastair Campbell grovelled at the feet of an astonished Rupert Murdoch, they were asked if all this was serious and not just electioneering. Blair replied that it was ‘absolutely for real’.

Blair and Brown continued to attack what they could in John Major’s ‘Thatcherism with a human face’. They were scathing about Norman Lamont’s private finance initiative, ‘a cynical distortion of the public accounts’, according to Blair. They opposed trust schools and private provision in the NHS. But Blair was careful never to criticise Thatcherism as such, regarding it (probably wrongly) as a proven electoral asset that the public needed to know he would not reverse.