Bill Clinton and Tony Blair held seminars on the ‘third way’ – Boris Johnson is their disciple

The prime minister is trying to steal Labour’s best tunes, according to John Rentoul

Bill and Hillary Clinton met the Queen on a visit to the UK (AFP/Getty)

Today’s A-level politics students devote a surprising amount of time to the ideas of Anthony Giddens, the Labour peer who wrote a book called The Third Way in 1998. I spoke to a class recently and was asked what role there was today for Giddens – “one of the key thinkers on our core political ideas unit”.  

Giddens’s book was said at the time to provide the ideological underpinning of the New Labour government, although Tony Blair tended to use the phrase, and the idea, more crudely, to mean neither the new right of Thatcherism nor the old left of Labour’s past.  

He invited Giddens to seminars at Chequers, the prime minister’s country house, with Bill Clinton and an array of thinkers and politicians, in 1997. President Clinton returned the invitation the following year, with a session at the White House, when the Monica Lewinsky crisis was at its height. The president kept falling asleep until he drank six large mugs of black coffee, at which point he started to expound brilliantly on policy detail.  

The idea of the third way was pretty simple in US politics too. Dick Morris, Clinton’s adviser, invented the concept of “triangulation”, which he defined as taking a position that “not only blended the best of each party’s views but also transcended them to constitute a third force in the debate”.

Giddens returned to his sociology textbooks; Clinton ran out of terms; and Blair had enough problems of his own; but the third way continued to be the essence of successful democratic politics. Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn seemed to contradict that assumption, but Trump could have been a populist Democrat and the critical thing about Corbyn is that, although he came close, he didn’t win.  

Now Boris Johnson is the latest to lay claim to Giddens’s legacy. His article for The Daily Telegraph on New Year’s Day was unusually explicit. He said the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was “a lesson for this country and our way ahead, because it is a brilliant collaboration: between state activism and free market capitalism”.

This praise for the active state is the kind of thing that Giddens was writing about in the 1990s – although there has also always been a strand of it on the Heseltinian wing of the Conservative Party. The prime minister went on: “It was thanks to government cash that the vaccine was developed.” (“Government” cash? That is Labour talk: the Tories used to prefer “taxpayers’ money”.) 

“But it was thanks to the commercial savvy and drive of AstraZeneca that we have a UK-made vaccine that is good to go into people’s arms less than a year after the pandemic began. So the lesson is that you need both – both public and private sector.” Tony Blair could not have put it better.  

If you are studying the A-level politics syllabus and it asks about the role of Giddens’s ideas today, the answer is in those paragraphs.  

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator