Cameron is making the intellectual running now — with a little help from the Blairites

12 January 2008

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

Mr Brown will recognise all this only too well: it is where the Blairites were taking Labour before losing their leader. People like Alan Milburn were convinced that the only future in British politics lay in the empowerment of voters — and was determined to claim this territory for Labour. He would quote Keir Hardie to the effect that socialism ‘is the people themselves acting through their organisations, regulating their own affairs’. John Reid argued the same, telling his party he wanted to create choice for everyone, not just the rich.

It took a political force as strong as Gordon Brown to put a lid on this intellect-ual energy and to keep it hermetically sealed. So, while the Blairites did the initial ideological bulldozing, it is Mr Cameron who is building on the ground the former Prime Minister cleared — especially in school and welfare reform. ‘If it had not been for Blair, we could never have been this radical on welfare,’ one shadow Cabinet member told me, admitting the debt owed by framers of the Tory Green Paper on welfare reform to John Hutton, Blair’s last welfare minister. ‘John Hutton and Lord Adonis [schools minister] will be gnashing their teeth when they see what we’re doing. It’s what they dreamed about.’

Not all ex-Blairites confine their energy to teeth-gnashing. While Mr Brown may have little time for or interest in their thoughts, they find a ready and appreciative audience in the centre-right think tanks flourishing around Westminster. People like Professor Julian Le Grand and Simon Stevens, both key ex-advisers to Blair, can now be found writing pamphlets or giving closed-door speeches discussing their experiences and prognoses. It is remarkably easy these days to persuade a Blairite thinker to address a right-of-centre audience in London, where they are heard with genuine fascination and not a little admiration.