In Manchester on Tuesday, Tony Blair will deliver his 13th and final speech as Labour leader to the party’s conference. Over the years, his addresses to the rank and file have been a reliable source of slogans and soundbites that have entered the political bloodstream: ‘Labour’s coming home’ (1996); ‘a thousand days to prepare for a thousand years’ (1997); ‘backbone, not backdown’ (1998); ‘the forces of conservatism’ (1999); ‘my irreducible core’ (2000); ‘the kaleidoscope has been shaken’ (2001); ‘at our best when at our boldest’ (2002); ‘I’ve not got a reverse gear’ (2003); and ‘every time I’ve ever introduced a reform in government, I wish in retrospect I had gone further’ (2005). There can be no doubt that the most incorrigibly thespian Prime Minister of modern times will be coining a bon mot or two for his rhetorical farewell.
Mr Blair’s conference speeches have differed sharply in tone and urgency since the geopolitical rupture of 11 September 2001. Once embarked upon his joint mission with George W. Bush, the Labour leader always had to devote a substantial portion of his annual speech to anti-Americanism and a plea to his party not to let its loathing of the Republican President cloud its judgment.
Yet — on the domestic front — his message has scarcely changed since his first such address in Blackpool 12 years ago. ‘Today’s politics,’ he said in 1994, ‘is about the search for security in a changing world.’ The Tories, in his view, could not deliver this security; Labour, therefore, had to reassure the public that it could, that it had ditched old-fashioned socialism (‘It’s time to change’), that it was ‘tough on crime’, that it was on the side of parents and patients in its public service policy, and that it would deliver ‘a politics of courage, honesty and trust’. He ended that first speech with a spree of verbless sentences: ‘Our Party. New Labour. Our Mission. New Britain. New Labour. New Britain.’
How hollow, embarrassing and downright misleading those slogans now seem, 12 years on, nine years after Mr Blair entered No. 10. Yet, when distilled to its essentials, what he will say on Tuesday will probably amount to much the same. As his close ally John Reid tells The Spectator today, the Blairite instinct is invariably to warn the Labour party against reverting to type, and to urge the rank and file to look outwards to the hectic forces of a changing world rather than to the internal controversies of their movement. This year Mr Blair will tell his party that the challenges of 2006 — globalisation, international terrorism, environmental degradation, population mobility — have changed since he became leader. But his core message to this fractious tribe will be exactly the same as it was in 1994: adapt or die. He will urge Labour activists not to move an inch off the centre ground, now coveted so greedily by David Cameron. As grotesque as the Prime Minister’s own failures have been, and as disinclined as his party is to heed him, it should do so if it wishes to stay in office.
For 12 years Mr Blair has acted as a human shield between his party and the electorate. Even as Labour has bemoaned our increasingly presidential system, it has benefited hugely from it. The voters’ attention has been focused upon the party leader — the candidate — rather than the party itself. And this, to put it mildly, has been to Labour’s benefit. Mr Blair’s flaws are too familiar to be worth listing again here. But his personal appeal — his charisma, his ability to connect with the British middle class, his apparent ordinariness and his sympathy for those who aspire to improve themselves — was his party’s greatest asset, at least until the collapse of his credibility over Iraq.
There is a suspicion among many of Gordon Brown’s supporters that Mr Blair secretly wishes Labour to fail after he is gone: après moi le deluge. In practice, they should brace themselves for something even worse: après lui la vérité.
Once he has left office, the public and the media will not — to adapt Nixon — have Blair to kick around any more. Labour itself will be scrutinised much more ruthlessly, its collective beliefs probed more deeply, and its fitness as a party of government called into question more systematically. A leader who puts distance between himself and his party (as Mr Blair always did) deflects such attention: he signals to the electorate that he has his activists firmly under control and defuses the issue. Would Mr Brown, so clearly a product of the Labour movement, be as plausible in this role?
Now the voters will look at Labour, unmediated by Mr Blair’s reassurances, and it is doubtful that they will like what they see. Deep in financial crisis, the party is increasingly dependent upon the trade unions, which are determined to thwart further public service reform. Drained of energy and ideas, most Labour MPs seem to regard Mr Blair’s imminent departure as an opportunity to reassert a long-discredited set of values in which public sector workers are more important than public service consumers, in which public spending is the answer to everything, and in which any threat to the monolithic state or the old-fashioned welfare system is to be regarded with the utmost suspicion. The threat of global terrorism will not evaporate when the PM resigns, in spite of what many Labour activists seem to think.
If the polls are correct, the Labour party and the public share a desire to see Mr Blair leave No. 10 very soon. But there the convergence ends. The last thing the voters want is a resurgence of old-fashioned Labourism, as Mr Blair’s party may have to learn the hard way. This week Labour cannot wait to say farewell to the most electorally successful Prime Minister it has ever had. A year from now, the party may already be wishing that he would come back.
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