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The ghosts of the past

The ghosts return as Brown fights to escape the Blairite past

Fraser Nelson

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

At the Labour party conference in Bournemouth, Tony Blair was airbrushed out of the picture. But this week Blair’s ghost has returned to haunt Gordon Brown with a new biography of the ex-PM, sniping from the disaffected and the evidence of Yates of the Yard on cash for honours. The challenge now for Gordon Brown is to lay out an agenda that allows new Labour to move beyond its past.

For an ex-Prime Minister only four months out of office, Mr Blair is said to be remarkably relaxed. Aged 54, two years younger than his successor, he is focused on the next stage in his career — and, whatever that may be, his prime purpose is to restore his political reputation. ‘This matters to Tony more than anything now, and his work in the Middle East is integral to this,’ says one Cabinet source. ‘He needs to cleanse the stain of Iraq. He also watched Thatcher torment Major, and saw how that damaged her in the eyes of posterity. So he knows how badly he could be damaged if he is seen to be destabilising Gordon.’

Some of his former strategists also believe that (as one explained to me) the ‘genie is out of the bottle’ as far as Blairite reform is concerned and that it has passed the point of no return. Once NHS users are given a choice of public or private hospitals by their GP, they will not allow that choice to be withdrawn. ‘Gordon may have to rebadge the Blairite agenda, perhaps under his title of “personalisation”,’ says one. ‘But it’s out there now. It’s popular. It is too late to go back on it.’

Yet for all his intellectual self-confidence, and suspicion that the visionless Mr Brown will come round to his way of thinking in the end, Mr Blair is uncertain about his party’s future and does not enjoy the coded and not-so-coded trashing of his tenure in No. 10 by his successor. ‘Tony is a human being,’ says the Cabinet source. ‘He genuinely believes Gordon has big shortcomings and could lose the election. However relaxed he claims to be, it must hurt to watch Gordon dissing you — and your premiership — day in, day out.’ And while he has an incentive to keep his qualms to himself — self-preservation — the same is not true for all his former lieutenants.

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