Politics

Tony Blair’s parting shot to his party — ‘You’re the future now’ — had the ring of irony. Much is uncertain after Labour’s conference in Manchester, not least the Prime Minister’s likely leaving date and the prospects for a full-blown leadership contest. But the notion that this exhausted, introspective and bitter party is ‘the future’ can be dismissed out of hand. Mr Blair’s farewell was a formidable reminder of his performing talents and also of his utility to his party: as we said last week, he has acted for 12 years as a human shield between the public and Labour. Now that he is going, the movement will have to

In Manchester on Tuesday, Tony Blair will deliver his 13th and final speech as Labour leader to the party’s conference. Over the years, his addresses to the rank and file have been a reliable source of slogans and soundbites that have entered the political bloodstream: ‘Labour’s coming home’ (1996); ‘a thousand days to prepare for a thousand years’ (1997); ‘backbone, not backdown’ (1998); ‘the forces of conservatism’ (1999); ‘my irreducible core’ (2000); ‘the kaleidoscope has been shaken’ (2001); ‘at our best when at our boldest’ (2002); ‘I’ve not got a reverse gear’ (2003); and ‘every time I’ve ever introduced a reform in government, I wish in retrospect I had gone

Because of what John Prescott calls the ‘dustbin of last week’, we now know that a new leader of the Labour party will be elected this year or next. This will be only the second time in history that a Labour leader will have been chosen while the party has been in office. The first was in 1976, when Jim Callaghan succeeded Harold Wilson. Then, the vote was simple: all Labour MPs could vote, and no one else. Today, it is complicated. The electorate divides into thirds — MPs, the party’s members and the trade unions. When a leader of the governing party is chosen, he is certain in fact,

‘New, new, new,’ Tony Blair told a meeting of European socialist leaders shortly after becoming Prime Minister, ‘everything is new.’ Embarrassing at the time, that declaration now seems merely a distant and risible memory. For, after nine years, the one thing this administration cannot possibly claim to be is ‘new’. In his original campaign for office between 1994 and 1997, Mr Blair presented novelty as a good in itself. By relabelling Labour as ‘New’, he signalled not only that the party of old-fashioned socialism had changed, but that it offered a fresh and vernal alternative to the Conservative winter. Underpinning this was the false implication that mere novelty would translate

Given the choice between a drunken Charles Kennedy and a sober Sir Menzies Campbell — to adapt the Times’s famous comparison of George Brown and Harold Wilson — we now know that the Liberal Democrat high command chose the former. There were four frontbenchers gathered in a room in March 2004 when they received first-hand confirmation that they were indeed being led by an alcoholic. This explained his mysterious absences, his slurred words in morning meetings and general level of inactivity. So the quartet, including Sir Menzies, took a unanimous decision: to do nothing. It mattered little. Leadership is not so important to today’s Lib Dems, who have become more

Each autumn the Labour party performs a ritualistic drama. First, trade unionists and left-wingers talk darkly about insurrection at the annual party conference. Blair must go, they say. At conference fringe meetings, such whispers become a full-blown war cry. Next Gordon Brown gives a rousing speech, laying out his rival vision of the future. There is talk of mutiny even as the Prime Minister comes on stage. But as he starts his oration, his audience is quickly spellbound. Rebels fall silent. Then applaud. Then coo. Then everyone boards the train back to London and the new parliamentary term begins. This year the show has finally moved on. It will be