In a Swedish log cabin, I grasped the core truth about New Labour

A log cabin by a frozen lake in the snowy fastness of central Sweden is a good place to contemplate the future of Blairite third-way politics. Scandinavia has some claim to be the spiritual home of social democracy and, though we on the Right have been predicting the Swedish model’s collision with the buffers for at least 40 years, the Swedes have remained inconveniently oblivious to our prophecies. They seem still to be trotting along quite nicely, driving their Volvos through the snow, taking their pleasures a little solemnly, but living life in an even, if unspectacular, way.

Our host, however, was no Swede, but a British friend who remains sympathetic to our Prime Minister’s aims and achievements, and not many years ago saw things from the inside. As the snowflakes drifted down we talked — he hopefully — about legacy and prospects: not of the man but of the ideas Tony Blair has come to represent in politics. Is there an heir ‘ism’ to Blairism?

Essentially this is the question which, on my return on Tuesday to England, I saw that Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn had invited fellow Labour MPs to discuss that night at Westminster. That (as they put it) there is ‘an enormous appetite’ for debate about the future direction of the party, and that a leadership challenge would open this debate up was more than a mischievous gesture towards Mr Brown (though it was at least that). It should resonate widely in the Parliamentary Labour party. Some of the Chancellor’s friends, too, think the answer to the question of what, post-Blair, ‘New Labour’ will come to mean remains hazy, and in need of frank discussion.

Let us take a stab at what the ‘new’ element in New Labour amounts to. First, discard some false trails. Foreign policy, for example.