The ghosts return as Brown fights to escape the Blairite past

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.

You could have spent the whole week at Labour’s conference in Bournemouth without realising somebody called Tony Blair had ever existed. His face, his ideas, his legacy had all but vanished from the official and fringe literature. He may have been briefly mentioned in speeches, as a play’s director might ritualistically thank the janitor. But not since Trotsky was airbrushed from the Bolshevik photograph gallery has a political leader been so suddenly and dramatically forgotten. It has been Year Zero for Comrade Brown — aptly satirised as the ‘Age of Change’ in Private Eye — with no hint of there having been a preceding era of any value.

Yet this week, and no less dramatically, the ghost of Tony Blair has returned to the feast like Banquo’s. His biographer, Anthony Seldon, has revealed new and extraordinary details of Blair’s final months in which the then Prime Minister declared himself an ‘abused and bullied wife’. The word at Westminster is that Cherie Blair is not enjoying life after No. 10, and that her memoirs will even blame Mr Brown’s guerrilla campaign for her husband’s heart condition. Blairite ex-ministers are popping up in newspapers with disobliging, anonymous comments — or, in Lord Falconer’s case, on the record calls for Mr Brown to deliver a ‘vision’. And then on Tuesday we had assistant commissioner John Yates in the House of Commons, resurrecting the loans-for-honours horror with some very piquant remarks about how New Labour does business.