At last the Tories are setting the political agenda, and Blair is running scared

Shortly before Christmas last year I went off to write a book about a malign modern trend, the rise of political lying. Regrettably, during the two months I have been absent, the lying has continued unabated. In other respects, however, British politics has changed.

Back in December there was a widespread assumption, bordering on certainty, that Tony Blair was heading for a third successive landslide victory. You could tell this by the way the two parties were conducting themselves in public. In the case of New Labour, the real battle was the contest to succeed Tony Blair on some indeterminate date after the general election, while the election itself was taken for granted.

Among the Tories it was abject gloom. Michael Howard, who looked tired, was written off. It was clear that there was going to be a great Liberal Democrat revival at the election, but nobody seriously thought that the Conservatives would add more than a handful of seats. Thoughts were therefore turning towards a summer leadership election between the home affairs spokesman David Davis and Liam Fox, the party chairman. I went to a Christmas party attended by a large number of Tory grandees in central London in mid-December, the talk was of how Davis and Fox would insist that Michael Howard went at once after the election defeat, rather than allow him to stay on and give time for David Cameron, allegedly Howard’s chosen successor, to emerge. This left a distasteful sense of starving men fighting for the few remaining scraps of flesh on a corpse. It was very gloomy indeed, although the champagne was excellent.