"The era of tribal political leadership is over," said Tony Blair in his
keynote speech to the Murdoch Corporation on Sunday. Not surprisingly it has already provoked some lively debate, not least on
Labour Home.
I can see three very good reasons why he would say such a thing. First, because he believes it, though he is wrong about that. Second, because he would like to be able to claim that ridding the British Left of ideology is part of his precious legacy, though he is wrong about that too.
But the main reason he said it was simply an attempt to guarantee Labour's future relationship with Murdoch, reassuring him that socialism really isn't going to make a comeback under his successors and that the Labour Party is now just as apt to end up to the right of the Tories as to the left.
In his analysis of the Tories, and David Cameron at least, he is correct, as I have
previously discussed. Where Blair falls down - not for the first time in his career - is in his understanding of the Labour Party.
For of course, the two beasts are not the same. There are plenty of people out there - as any brief visit to
Iain Dale will confirm - who think that David Cameron is destroying the ideological base of the Conservative Party in much the way Blair destroyed Labour's.
They are wrong as it happens, because although belief in a right-wing ideology (low taxation, small government etc) is undoubtedly one of Conservatism's distinguishing characteristics, it has not, historically speaking, been the party's underlying raison d'etre.
At different times in its history, the "clothes" that most would nowadays associate with the Tory Party have regularly been worn by others, notably Gladstone's liberals in the 19th century and Joe Chamberlain's imperialists in the early 20th.
What the Conservative Party is really about - and this is why the Hague-IDS-Howard years were such a surprising aberration - is the pursuit and retention of power, allied to an underlying belief that, in a small-c conservative country, it is invariably the party best qualified to exercise it.
This has never been true of the Labour Party, in that the pursuit of power for its own sake has never been its underlying raison d'etre. As Harold Wilson said: "The Labour Party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing."
Let's face it, even Tony Blair has had to pay lip service to that, although his pre-1997 talk of governing in the interests of "the many not the few" now sound increasingly hollow.
Either way, such is the degree of anger felt by many Labour members at Mr Blair's abandonment of its historic principles that it is inconceivable that, under its next leader, the party will not seek to reconnect with those roots.
Whatever the Tories do, it is my belief that the Labour Party will remain the party of fairness, justice, tolerance, internationalism and all those old ideals - owing much more to Jesus than Marx - with which it has always been associated.
Update: Just spotted an excellent post by
Shaphan - one of the most underrated political bloggers around - which highlights another aspect of Mr Blair's attitude to ideology, namely the way he pronounces the word.
In my view, his pronunciation of it to rhyme with idiocy as opposed to idealism has always been quite deliberate.
