Inside New Labour

The New Labour era began formally with the election of Tony Blair as leader of the Labour party in 1994, following the death of John Smith. It ended with the defeat of Gordon Brown at the general election of 2010. During these 16 years the Labour party won three general elections, in 1997, 2001 and 2005, the first two with very large parliamentary majorities, and governed for 13 years. Before this the party had on three occasions, in 1950, 1966 and 1974, won consecutive election victories, but had never succeeded in governing for two full parliaments. Its longest period in government had been the six and a half years between 1945 and 1951. Its longest serving prime minister was Harold Wilson, followed by Clement Attlee. In the hundred years in which the Labour party has existed it has struggled to assert itself against a dominant Conservative party which has enjoyed three long uninterrupted spells in office—in the 1930s, in the 1950s and in the 1980s and 1990s. For a time New Labour appeared to have changed that, but with the election of David Cameron in 2010 and the repositioning of the Labour party under Ed Miliband, many think the more familiar pattern of British politics has reasserted itself, with the Conservatives regaining their dominant position. If this turns out to be so the New Labour era will stand out in ever sharper relief as the one instance when Labour gained the ascendancy over the Conservatives and held it for a considerable period, establishing itself as the governing party.

Since the end of the New Labour era, and even before it did officially come to a close, there has been a spate of memoirs and diaries from leading figures in New Labour and the Labour party. These include the first three instalments of Alastair Campbell's diaries (Campbell 2010, 2011a and 2011b), the diaries of Chris Mullin, the former Bennite who served as a junior minister under Tony Blair and chaired the Home Affairs Select Committee (Mullin 2010) and the diaries of David Blunkett, The Blunkett Tapes (Blunkett 2006). Blair has published his own memoirs, A Journey, in October 2010 (Blair 2010), shortly after the appearance of Peter Mandelson's memoir, The Third Man in July (Mandelson 2010). John Prescott had already published Prezza: My Story (Prescott 2008) and there have since been volumes by Alastair Darling, Back from the Brink (Darling 2011) and Jonathan Powell (2011), The New Machiavelli. There have also been several important biographies and commentaries by others, including Anthony Seldon, John Rentoul, Andrew Rawnsley and Steve Richards (Rawnsley 2000 and 2010); Rentoul 2001; Seldon 2008; Richards 2010; Seldon and Lodge 2011). Of the three leading figures in New Labour, Gordon Brown is the only one not yet to have given his own version of events. In December 2010 he published Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation, which was an account of the financial meltdown at the end of 2008 and the part he played in helping to overcome the crisis (Brown 2010). But he has not yet published a book of memoirs which sets out his account of his role in New Labour and his relationship with Tony Blair.

Political memoirs are often very mixed in quality, but at their best they can illuminate the events they describe. They are a type of insider account (Gamble 2002), alongside diaries and investigative journalism. What is common to most of these insider accounts, as David Richards and Helen Mather have pointed out, is that they are ‘heavily agent-centred’, and ‘driven by a concern with legacy and the desire to convey a particular version of history’ (Richards and Mather 2010, 501, 507). Diaries are composed (or should be) at the same time as the events they describe, and the best diaries are not intended for publication, but these come from a lost age of innocence and many political diaries are now overtly written to be published. These are really a disguised form of political memoir. Most political memoirs are emotion recollected in tranquillity, often written at some considerable distance from the events themselves. Tony Blair's memoirs appeared in 2010, three years after he left office. The first volume of Thatcher's memoirs, The Downing Street Years, appeared in 1993.

Why do politicians write memoirs? The overriding reason appears to be to put their side of the story, presenting themselves in as good a light as possible, by providing a coherent and sympathetic narrative of his or her actions and achievements. They are necessarily self-centred, and focused on agency, but can still be very revealing, not least about the motivations of their authors, and how they see the world. Richards and Mather argue that most memoirs by British politicians assume the truth of the Westminster Model of politics, in which ministers decide and civil servants advise, which puts all the spotlight on the politicians and the decisions they took and the difference they can be said to have made (Richards and Mather 2010). They show how the rules governing publication of memoirs have evolved since the 1960s, and how flouting of them by politicians has gone unpunished, which has tended to encourage a trend towards instant memoirs, with politicians keen to profit from getting into print as soon as possible after leaving office. Rules for civil servants remain much tighter, and relatively few civil servants do write memoirs, remaining true to the operating codes of the British political class, but there are signs that this is weakening (Richards and Mather 2010).

The limitations of memoirs as source material for political scientists and political historians are evident, but they are still valuable for providing certain insights that are difficult to obtain elsewhere. The important thing is to see them for what they are—agent-centred accounts with a particular story to sell, and constructed within a particular idea of the political process. They need to be understood within broader political contexts, but they are a necessary part of that. The more memoirs there are the better it is, because then it is possible to compare different accounts of crucial political episodes.

Among New Labour memoirs those of Blair and Mandelson have received particular attention because of the tensions and psycho-dramas that developed between the three architects of New Labour. The confirmation in such detail of what had long been suspected and written about by journalists such as Andrew Rawnsley accounts for the interest with which these volumes have been received. The books by Blair and Mandelson have both been best-sellers. A full account by Gordon Brown of his political career would arouse similar interest, should he ever choose to write one. The reason for this fascination about these three leaders of New Labour comes from many things. One of them is simple curiosity. If New Labour was so riven with internal tensions from the beginning, how did the project survive as long as it did, and provide the basis for Labour's longest period in office? The way in which the various memoirs have been received in the press and by a grateful Conservative opposition has been to portray New Labour as deeply contradictory and dysfunctional, but if that were all, it would be hard to understand why Labour kept winning elections, and how in particular the relationship between Brown and Blair endured for 10 years in government.

Peter Mandelson is perhaps most revealing on this. His memoir is one of the best to have been written in recent years. It is dispassionate and reflective. Mandelson has the advantage of not being one of the two central protagonists, but the third man. He also had an eventful political career. One of the prime movers of New Labour, he was appointed a minister after 1997, but was forced to resign from government twice during Labour's first term, eventually leaving parliament to be European Commissioner in Brussels in 2004, only to be recalled by Brown in 2008, ennobled and ending as deputy prime minister. Mandelson is a constant and indispensable presence in the New Labour years, but his role kept changing. Blair relied on him to the end as a confidant even after he had dispatched him to Brussels (a decision he immediately regretted). But what is most revealing about Mandelson's memoir is the strength of the relationship he had with Brown, despite their falling out in 1994. This allows him to give a more rounded account of the struggle between Blair and Brown. He saw correctly that the real strength of New Labour lay in the collaboration between Blair, Brown and himself, and that it was ultimately the failure to maintain that collaboration that destroyed New Labour. He writes at the end of his memoir: ‘I know that the three of us have one central regret: that had we worked together after 1994 as we had in the initial crusade that made New Labour possible, we would have accomplished even more, and far more happily’ (Mandelson 2010, 557).

Mandelson's personal relationship with Brown was severely damaged after he decided to switch his support from Brown to Blair in 1994. He has never considered that he made the wrong choice, but he still thought Brown was an essential part of New Labour, and agreed that he was the person who should succeed Blair when the time came. Brown's antipathy towards Mandelson was also not absolute. He cut him out of his circle after 1994 because Mandelson was now so close to Blair, and aides of Brown were responsible for Mandelson's first resignation in 1998, but Brown never completely broke his ties to Mandelson. Even after Mandelson's second resignation in 2001 Mandelson reveals that Brown was willing to see him return but only after Blair had been ousted. Brown made good this pledge in 2008, when Mandelson returned as business secretary. If Mandelson had subsequently joined one of the many plots against Brown it is hard to see how Brown could have survived, but he was steadfastly loyal, as his memoir explains, and was even irritated occasionally when Blair rang up to complain about the direction the Brown government was taking.

Yet although on his own account he was remarkably loyal to Brown and helped sustain him through some very dark days, he was also very critical of him. Brown does not come well out of the memoirs that have so far appeared, particularly from some of those who worked most closely with him—Mandelson, Blair and Darling—although all of them retain respect for his qualities. But they also found his behaviour at times impossible, and hard to forgive. Darling, who had been close to Brown, is perhaps the most scathing of the three. None of them believe that he succeeded in making the transition from chancellor to prime minister. He tried to run Downing Street as he had done the Treasury for so long, importing some of the methods he had used in his war against Blair, briefing against his colleagues and reacting violently to criticism. It still comes as a shock to realise how much of his energy as chancellor was poured into removing Blair. In so doing he sabotaged a great deal of what the government was trying to do, particularly after 2001. Brown seems to have despised Blair as a politician, considering himself far superior. He felt towards Blair rather as Nixon felt towards Kennedy. He acknowledged that Blair had gifts as a communicator, but thought him superficial and inconsequential. He used to complain constantly to Mandelson about Blair's lack of intellectual rigour, his tendency to raise expectations too high, his lack of consistency, his addiction to permanent revolution, and his lack of broad-based support in the party and the unions (Mandelson 2010, 375, 377). Brown thought by contrast that he would correct all these things once he was prime minister, and he became increasingly impatient that Blair was blocking his path to the top.

Mandelson is very clear about the Granita dinner in 1994, at which the Brown camp believed Blair promised to hand over to Brown midway through a second term. No such undertaking was given, he insists, nor could it have been when the party was not yet in government, and when what the situation would be so far ahead could not be anticipated. But he acknowledges, and this is confirmed in Blair's memoir, that Blair did agree in 2003 at a dinner with Brown and John Prescott that he would step down before the end of the 2001 parliament (Mandelson 2010, 372–373). This was at a low point in Blair's fortunes when the Iraq occupation was going from bad to worse, and Brown was exerting constant pressure on Blair to announce the date of his departure. Blair agreed reluctantly to step down but only if Brown gave him full co-operation in the time that remained to him to implement his domestic policies. Blair claims in A Journey that Brown never did so and therefore that he was absolved from the agreement. Brown considered himself betrayed. Mandelson does not dispute that Blair gave a promise, but argues that he did so under duress, and that Brown was wrong to act as he did. His judgement is unequivocal: ‘to have refused to cooperate or work with him in office was in my view unforgiveable’ (Mandelson 2010, 427).

What both Mandelson and Blair confirm is how systematically Brown and his team set about undermining Blair and working for his removal after 2001. When confronted by Mandelson with what he was doing, Brown denied it vehemently: ‘I am not fighting him’ (Mandelson 2010, 375). But Mandelson shows how patently that was not the case. Brown complained to him that Blair and his circle were reforming dilettantes who lacked the Treasury's interest or competence in dealing with detail. But Mandelson thought the real problem was that Brown either disagreed with the policies or refused to agree with them in case it strengthened Blair. The same point is made forcefully by Jonathan Powell. He argues that Brown's strategy on many issues including the euro was dictated by his campaign to replace Blair. Brown told Blair in 2001 that he would only consent to the euro if Blair stood down as prime minister (Powell 2011, 254). Brown's strategy throughout the second term, rather than formally disowning the Labour brand, was to foment unrest in the parliamentary Labour party (Mandelson 2010, 351) by allowing his aides to suggest that Brown did not agree with many of the reforms being pushed by Number 10 such as foundation hospitals or university tuition fees, and that if Brown was prime minister things would be different. Mandelson notes that after the 2001 election victory, despite Labour winning another landslide, there was a growing inclination in the parliamentary party to reject New Labour and the modernising agenda. Blair was determined to confront this opposition, but Brown courted it because he saw it as a means to increase the pressure on Blair. This was the subtext of his coded interventions and the many briefings undertaken by his allies. Yet Mandelson notes that when Michael Howard after 2003 began to highlight the division at the top of the government, claiming that Labour was offering a false prospectus—Vote Blair Get Brown—Brown became furious that he was being typecast as Old Labour, and blamed it on Blair and the people round him (Mandelson 2010, 383).

The difficulty was that by this time Blair himself had come to believe that Gordon was becoming closer to Old Labour than New, and no longer believed in the project, so clouded had his judgement become by his burning desire to be prime minister. Blair began to despair of his chancellor. He talked to Mandelson about Brown being flawed, about his lack of perspective and his paranoia (Mandelson 2010, 377), the constant ‘shrieking and barking’ from next door (Blair 2010, 577). The relentless warfare was debilitating. The obvious question is why did Blair not act against his chancellor? Blair and Mandelson spend many pages reflecting on this. This was the Gordon problem—the problem of the brilliant and the impossible (Blair 2010, 340). The easiest time to have moved Brown from the Treasury would have been straight after the 2001 election. Blair considered it but decided against, and maintains that this was still the right decision (Blair 2010, 340). He regarded Brown as an outstanding chancellor, who had solid media and party support, and there was no one as good to replace him. During the second term when relations deteriorated so badly, Blair in ordinary circumstances would almost certainly have changed his mind and moved Brown from the Treasury. But by the time he was ready to consider doing this the political outlook had been transformed by Iraq. As Mandelson puts it: ‘I did not—could not—anticipate how dramatically Tony's political strength would drain away over the course of our second term in government’ (Mandelson 2010, 341). In 2003 Blair's team seriously discussed what to do about Brown. One plan was code-named Teddy Bear (Mandelson 2010, 371). It aimed to divide the Treasury into a separate Ministry of Finance and an Office of the Budget and Delivery. Brown would be left with the former and no longer able to block domestic reform. Other options included moving Brown to the Foreign Office. When the plans were put to Brown he gave a flat refusal. Iraq had made Brown unmoveable, because if he refused another post in the government and resigned, he could then launch a coup from the back benches. The balance of power between Blair and Brown swung decisively in Brown's favour once the invasion of Iraq turned out not to be a swift triumph but a protracted occupation. It forced the concession from Blair that he would resign before the end of the second term, and then the public declaration that he would not fight a fourth election. Even so Brown still did not trust him, and in the end Blair was forced out by a coup orchestrated by Brown's supporters, before he was ready to step down. Blair concluded that he could not fight Brown any longer. He suspected that the New Labour project was terminal, but wanted it to be clearly seen that the responsibility for this lay with Brown moving away from New Labour, rather than Blair's clinging to office (Blair 2010, 617).

Blair's premiership was marked by some major successes both domestically and internationally, but also by two great failures—the failure to deal with Brown's open defiance and continual undermining of his government and the failure to foresee the consequences of joining the American invasion of Iraq. In the first he showed indecision and weakness; in the second, certainty and strength. As David Runciman has argued, it might have been better, for Blair, if it had been the other way round (Runciman 2010). The contrast between the two failures is revealing. Between them they ultimately destroyed his political career and destroyed New Labour as a force in British politics. Blair's memoir, like Thatcher's, is both enormously self-confident but also a confession of failure. Blair is aware of what heights he scaled at the beginning and what depths he plumbed at the end. His book is a strange mixture of things. It is written in a popular, direct style. It is frank, often blunt in its assessments of individuals and events. On Frank Field, for example, he writes: ‘the problem was not so much that his thoughts were unthinkable but unfathomable’ (Blair 2010, 217); and on Nick Brown he is scathing about his subsequent disloyalty after Blair had earlier saved him from dismissal when scandal struck (Blair 2010, 219). The book exudes certainty and self-belief and is a manual about political leadership. The writing style however is often loose and verbose, and would have benefited from more editing. The text is littered with redundant phrases like ‘to be fair’, and platitudes such as ‘History as ever will be the final judge’, as if there are ever final judgements in history. But the great strength of the book, and presumably one of the reasons it shot to the top of the best-seller lists, is because his account of what he was trying to do in politics and how he went about it is often riveting and surprisingly candid. It is both one of the most self-serving political biographies of recent times and at the same time not self-serving at all, because it is so revealing about a particular approach to politics and to leadership (Rentoul 2010). It helps explain the way Blair felt as well as the way he thought. As David Marquand has argued, the passions driving politicians are often as important as the rational calculations they make in explaining why they act as they do (Marquand 2009).

One of the things A Journey makes clear is that Blair now recognises how unprepared he was for government and how long it took him to understand what he wanted to do and how to do it. This meant that it was only right at the end that he finally felt he had a clear agenda and knew how to push it through. Mandelson argues that Blair's tragedy was that ‘he came fully into his prime only in the year before his time was up’ (Mandelson 2010, 426). Blair's book is in part about this awakening. The paradox was that when he had trust and support and could persuade people, he did not really know what he wanted to do, and by the time he did know he no longer had the trust and support to persuade any longer. The book should perhaps be subtitled the making of a conviction politician, because like Margaret Thatcher Blair grew into the role, and became increasingly convinced of the rightness of his political judgements the longer he remained in office. In this respect perhaps the most interesting part of A Journey is actually the postscript where Blair sets out his credo, offering in the course of it a fierce critique of the direction the party moved after he ceased to be its leader, and in particular the way that many in the party responded to the financial crash.

Where Blair differs from Thatcher is in his relationship to his party. Mandelson and Brown in their different ways both have a deep abiding tribal commitment to the Labour party, an instinctive loyalty. Blair was always an outsider, and became more so the longer his career lasted. He believed that only if the party followed his direction could it win elections in the kind of country Britain had become. He was a charismatic leader detached from his party, in ways similar to both Lloyd George and Churchill. Thatcher by contrast was always revered by her party rank and file. She was never in any danger of being jeered and despised, in the way that both Churchill and Blair at times were by members of their own parties. Blair for all his success often seems a lonely and isolated figure. His main supporters in British politics were in the circle around Peter Mandelson and the circle around David Cameron. Blair appreciated Cameron's quality and doubted that Brown could win an election against him (Mandelson 2010, 429). It is striking that in his memoir there are remarkably few centre-left politicians with whom he feels rapport. The exception is Bill Clinton, but most of the others, such as Angela Merkel, George Bush and Lee Kuan Yew belong to the centre-right. Blair often seems much more at ease with conservative arguments and attitudes while maintaining fiercely that these are necessary to keep Labour electable. But he did not advocate the adoption of policies often more associated with the centre-right than the centre-left for tactical reasons but because he thought they were the right policies.

Peter Mandelson, echoing Weber, argues that the best leaders need both inner and outer strength to withstand the remorseless pressures of leadership, but that they also exhibit something else, an inner repose, an ability to project calm, which means an ability to listen, reflect and convince others to follow your leadership after you have made up your mind. Brown had the toughness needed for a front-rank politician, according to Mandelson, but lacked inner repose and therefore judgement. He ‘craved a structure and an orderly process around him, but he was the first to disrupt it’ (Mandelson 2010, 448). Yet in some situations, such as the response to the financial crisis in 2008 or the negotiations in the G20, Brown showed his great qualities, his intellect, his courage and his willingness to use force majeure. Mandelson is left pondering why Brown lacked the other qualities to make a success of leadership, the qualities that Blair had in abundance. Yet Mandelson is also critical of Blair. He quotes John Birt:

Another of Blair's failings was his particular brand of conviction politics. As his career went on he felt the need to listen less and less, so convinced was he that he was right. Too often his ethic of conviction came to overpower his ethic of responsibility in the way he formed his political judgements, as it had done with Thatcher. He became fond of saying: ‘It's worse than you think. I really believe it’. On his fateful decision not to criticise Israel for its intervention in Lebanon in 2006 he writes: ‘It wasn't that I didn't get public opinion on Lebanon, nor that I couldn't have articulated it. My difficulty was that I didn't agree with it’ (Blair 2010, 602). By the end it was not just his party that he was at odds with, but also on some issues the wider public. His support for radical reform in the public sector he always justified as necessary in order to keep Labour credible and popular; many of the specific measures, like the increase in university tuition fees, were not popular but Blair regarded them as right, and that it was the job of a leader to propose and push them through. He believed in the aspirational working class but had no time or sympathy for those who were not aspirational. As he puts it: ‘People at the bottom didn't just have dysfunctional working lives. They had dysfunctional lives fullstop’.

Blair is scathing about what happened to the party under Brown, and before the handover he had ceased to believe that it was in the interest of the party for Brown to succeed him, but by then it was too late. One of the reasons he claims he wanted to hang on was to see if a challenger to Brown might emerge. Otherwise the party faced ‘a kind of easy and ultimately muddled compromise with … Old Labour organisational politics, and bits of New Labour policy, together with trade-offs to the Left’ (Blair 2010, 605). He had become convinced that Brown only understood the appeal of New Labour as a polling strategy. He did not understand aspiration, which Blair thought had to be right at the centre of a successful progressive politics. Brown continually dodged the hard answers (Blair 2010, 60). For Blair the thought behind New Labour at its inception was that the party had to take ‘a revolutionary modernising leap’ (Blair 2010, 72), but this was not just a tactical move. To be a good communicator a leader had to have core beliefs, and the core belief for New Labour was aspiration. As Blair puts it, ‘I like people who want to succeed, and admire people who do … I hate class, but I love aspiration. It's why I like America’ (Blair 2010, 115). He regarded left and right as outmoded terms, and in their place suggested that the new divide in politics should be between those who favoured open societies and those who favoured closed societies. He considered that open societies are not necessarily liberal societies, however, as the term has come to be understood in Britain and the United States. They are consistent with a tough stance on law and order, and a readiness to use force abroad.

In his postscript, while praising Brown's immediate response to the financial crisis, he disagrees profoundly with the lessons Brown drew from it. Blair argues that a Keynesian response was exactly the wrong response. The market did not fail in the crisis, only a few financial markets. The most serious failure was that of government, and the last thing needed to restore prosperity and growth was to think that government should be given an extended role. Brown's strategy of not talking about cuts, only about investment, and refusing before the election the adoption of a medium-term plan for reducing the deficit was criticised by Blair as throwing away the hard-won reputation for economic competence that Brown himself had once done so much to create.

Blair's criticisms are very similar to those that came to be made by Coalition ministers after the election, but they were also shared by Alastair Darling and Peter Mandelson, two of the most senior ministers in Brown's government. Darling's criticisms of Brown are particularly devastating since he was not a Blairite and had at one time been close to Brown. He recounts how he and Brown fell out over policy, and how Brown then unleashed the forces of hell against him by permitting Damian McBride and others to brief against him, and eventually sought to move him from his post. Darling was saved by the sudden resignation of James Purnell, which made further destabilisation of the government unwise. Darling shows how Brown carried over many of the worst aspects of his behaviour as chancellor into Number 10. This confirms the widespread misgivings that existed about him in the party, misgivings that are aired extensively in conversations and gossip reported in Chris Mullin's diary (Mullin 2010).

Darling rightly complains about the way he was treated by Brown, but his main dispute with him concerned policy. Darling was determined to present a credible deficit reduction plan before the election, but he was thwarted by Brown, with serious consequences for Labour's reputation once the election was lost. As he wrote in his memoir, ‘I believe that we did deal with the crisis and guided the economy through the storm, but we failed to navigate a political course for the future that would convince the public’ (Darling 2011, 4). The Coalition readily assented to this and constructed a narrative that put the main blame for the financial crisis on Labour and on Brown's stewardship of the economy since 1997. In this way one of the central achievements of New Labour, its reputation for economic competence, was destroyed. The division in Labour's ranks proved fatal. Darling, Blair and Mandelson all believed that Labour had to prove that it could get on top of the deficit and endorse the fiscal conservatism that was sweeping Europe. This was politically astute, and Brown's policy was shown to be politically inept. But Brown was not wrong about the dangers of fiscal conservatism for the western economy, as the events of 2011 have proved. His stance on the economy in 2008–09 may in time come to be judged much more favourably.

Most New Labour memoirs so far have generally sided with Blair rather than Brown in the feud between the two. Brown's side of the story has not often been told, and he has not yet written his own memoirs. But there have been some sympathetic treatments, notably by Steve Richards and by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge (Richards 2010; Seldon and Lodge 2011). Richards argues that Brown had a different strategic and policy vision for New Labour, which did not make him Old Labour, but which did put him increasingly at odds with Blair. His burning ambition to be prime minister and his personal resentment of Blair were also key factors, but there was also a clash over the political and strategic direction of the New Labour project. This is important to remember amidst all the political gossip, and it is confirmed by Blair and Mandelson. Richards thinks that Brown would have sought to take Labour in a different direction had he established his own authority by winning a general election. His failure to seize his chance in September 2007, and then the political sea change brought about by the financial crash, removed the opportunity and put Brown permanently on the back foot and never able to recover after his brief honeymoon (Richards 2010).

The puzzle remains. After reading the different political memoirs the wonder is that New Labour achieved as much as it did, so dysfunctional were many of its internal relationships, and in particular the relationship between Blair and Brown. But this is where Mandelson's corrective is valuable. He shows that what made New Labour formidable was when its leading talents did work closely together, and enough of that collaboration survived even in its darkest days in government to sustain it. Brown and Blair were considerable figures, but much greater together than either were apart. Their visions of New Labour did increasingly diverge, but they were both New Labour visions. Their downfall and the end of the project they had launched and which had proved so successful were due in part to the failure of both of them to understand the secret of their success, but also to Brown's growing inability to accept Blair's leadership and to work constructively with him. Brown found being subordinate to Blair increasingly intolerable, but once free of Blair, he showed he lacked Blair's talent for leadership and crashed spectacularly. His defeat and the manner of it opened the way back for the Conservatives.

The New Labour period cannot be understood by memoirs alone and the accounts of the participants. The significance of New Labour's achievements and failures depends on an appreciation of the broader structures of power and the historical contexts that shape British politics and the British state. But memoirs are still an indispensable resource, and any more general interpretation of New Labour still has to come to terms with how the main participants thought and felt about what they were doing.