The ghost of 1997 haunts the 2024 election. The defining image of this year’s contest, barring any major upsets over the next fortnight, is already clear: Rishi Sunak drenched like a drowned chipmunk outside 10 Downing Street as he called the snap election. ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, Labour’s ’97 campaign anthem, was blasted out in the background. It was a pitiable sight: Sunak looked hapless, luckless and friendless. A John Major for the 21st century.
The first term of Blair – pre-9/11, pre-Iraq, the time of Gordon Brown being prudent and restrained (or so we thought) – exists as a nostalgic golden age
Like many people of a conservative temperament, I am often accused of living in the past. Maybe you get that thrown at you, too. A particular twist of this castigation is that one is nostalgic for ‘a time that never existed’ (usually the 1950s). But surely that is true of all nostalgia? The citizens of Britain in 1974 (strikes, bombings, power cuts) would be astonished to discover that anybody would be thinking fondly of their era, including their future selves. We remember only the smaller, warmer things: the details we don’t even notice or treasure at the time they’re happening. The popular idea of the interwar period, all cocktails and jazz and murders in country houses, is nothing like the realities of a crashed economy, war clouds and mass unemployment.
But those who lob this accusation are themselves caught up in a similar delusion, and nobody is challenging them on it. That D:Ream hit, which served as an unwelcome backdrop to Sunak’s speech, is 31 years old, and the Labour campaign and victory of 1997 is now well over the age of majority. The first term of Blair – pre-9/11, pre-Iraq, the time of Gordon Brown being prudent and restrained (or so we thought) and following the previous government’s spending plans – exists as another nostalgic golden age for many.
We live in a totally different world. But there seems to be an unspoken assumption among Labour-friendly, and even some Tory-friendly, commentators that we are still living in the same place; that with a ‘centrist’ Labour government we can switch back to the business-as-usual, nothing-much-doing politics of that time when Blair swept to power. That if we could only get rid of the Tories, Brexit, Farage, GB News, we could go back to the days when Blair was unassailable, everybody was sensible and nice, Alastair Campbell seemed almost like a reasonable human being.
My own memories of that moment are sunlit. A new day had dawned, had it not? I recall walking the beautifully sunlit London streets of 2 May 1997. I was 28 and had known no other government since I was 10. Flicking through the history of 1998 is entering another world, sparkling with surface blandness: there is the Good Friday Agreement, and no particular scandals or resignations except the Bernie Ecclestone/Formula 1 tobacco advertising affair, which seems pathetically small beer compared to the groping, sexting and sewage pumping of the 2020s. The popular culture has an epic, noble feel – Cher’s ‘Believe’, Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ – or Titanic, Shakespeare In Love, Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels.
But, as we know now, it was all an illusion. Politicians were, like everybody else, blind to the nightmare that was seeping through at the edges of the happy dream. The events of 9/11 fractured that mirage. The actions of the Western governments, including first-term Blair’s, to guarantee hopelessly unsound mortgages for political reasons, caused the financial crash; and then the politicians threw all the blame on to the bankers and lenders who were, after all, mostly only doing what that deranged legislation incentivised them to do.
Someone born during the 2007/8 crash is now 16 or 17. They have never known the Western economy working at anything like full pelt. And we wonder why they like the sound of alternatives to capitalism.
We live in the world that 1998 created: the long-term fruits of New Labour’s complacency, their endless tinkering and legislative hyperactivity, most of which the Tories simply continued, and which hampered their own feeble efforts to fight back at every turn. Remember Dominic Raab’s Bill Of Rights, anybody?
Labour are returning to government in a different world, to fresh looming issues and some very dark clouds (AI, China, the baby bust) which you’d think would be un-ignorable but which, like the Tories, they have nothing to say about. This is why I don’t find the dire warnings from some about the prospect of 18 years of Starmer to be very convincing. Why? Because this time around, there is no chance of returning even to the illusion of a golden age that could keep a Labour PM in power for long.
Join Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Kate Andrews for a post-election live recording of Coffee House Shots in Westminster, Thu 11 July. Bar opens 6.30pm, recording starts 7pm
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