As the Tories prepare to fight each other, New Labour braces itself for war

Political reporters always overstate the power of personality in politics. Meanwhile, we understate or entirely overlook other factors. We are gripped by surface phenomena and captivated by the gaudy and the transient. The causes we ascribe to great events are hopelessly short-term, inadequate and trivial. We attribute something like mystic powers to the ability of a single individual to change for good and evil the current of affairs. Journalists may write ‘the first draft of history’. But we bring to the task the mentality of the City trader, with his tiny attention span, worship of fashion and disdain for underlying values.

To take one contemporary example: the political characterisation of Chancellor Gordon Brown in British newspapers. Again and again, commentators refer to the Chancellor as ‘brilliant’, on account of the steady growth of the British economy since 1997. But this has almost nothing to do with Gordon Brown. The benign economic environment of the last five years is the result of the economic cycle, the buoyancy of the US market, the British supply-side reforms of the 1980s and the successful monetary policies pursued by the US Federal Reserve. The Chancellor has exerted some influence, but only at the margins, and very likely for the worse.

The same syndrome afflicts reporting of Tony Blair. The Prime Minister and his small band of acolytes are often praised for the allegedly devastating political skill which differentiates them from other, lesser players on the political stage. But this kind of thing is nothing more than abject power worship. There is abundant evidence to suggest that the Prime Minister and his advisers are just as fallible as anyone else. They have had so little to do with their prodigious electoral success that they might as well be lottery winners – good luck to them.