Twenty-five years on, we can now see that Blairite truths are eternal

A quarter of a century after the landslide of 1997, the Labour Party is coming round to a better understanding of its own achievements, writes John Rentoul

Tony Blair says Labour’s relative failure lies in failing to unite the Liberal and socialist traditions (Getty)

It is only a round number, but it gives you a sense of perspective. A quarter of a century on, we can see clearly now: not only that Labour has been a chronically unsuccessful party for most of its existence, but that it can succeed.

It doesn’t matter if you start with the founding of the Labour Party in 1900, or with its overtaking the Liberals as the main alternative to the Conservatives in the 1923 election, Labour has been out of power for twice as long as it has been in it.

As Tony Blair also said when he came to talk to our students at King’s College London in March: “No Labour government had lasted more than six years, and we lasted for 13, so we lasted for twice as long as the previous Labour governments.”

There are many different ways of saying similar things, and most of them have been said to the “Blair Years” class that I teach with Dr Michelle Clement and Professor Jon Davis. Andrew Adonis and Peter Mandelson both recited to us the history of Labour’s last 11 elections: “Lose, lose, lose, lose, Blair, Blair, Blair, lose, lose, lose, lose.” That takes us back to 1979 (the first “lose” in that list), but we can go further back. Blair is the only Labour leader since 1966 to win a sustainable Commons majority – that is, one that could last a whole parliament.

And – one of my favourite facts, this – the number of Conservative leaders who failed to become prime minister before Blair: zero; while Blair was prime minister: three; since Blair was prime minister: zero. (There is a complicated footnote here about Austen Chamberlain, who was Conservative leader in the Commons, 1921-22, while Lord Curzon was the party’s leader in the Lords, and neither was overall leader, but you get the gist.)

The danger of paying attention to the 25th anniversary of the 1997 election is that it obscures that longer history, and might be used to sustain the myth that history began when that new dawn broke. The Blairites may have themselves to blame for that, because there was a Year Zero feel to “the project” as it was called in those days – although the whole point of modernisation was that the zero year was 1994, when Blair was elected as leader and renamed the party New Labour. For many of Blair’s supporters, 1997 was the end of something as much as it was a new beginning.

There used to be a cottage industry of Jeremy Corbyn supporters online, though, for whom 1997 was the starting point. In an unconscious compliment to Blair, they took a majority of 179 seats as the natural level of Labour support, and so for them everything that happened since was betrayal, loss and failure (until the great moral victory of the election of 2017). Electorally, it was true that things could only get worse, although the Tories’ net gain of one seat in the 2001 election was, for Labour, a remarkably modest falling off from greatness.

When Blair came to King’s he gave us a bit of the broad sweep of history, and the thesis that he adopted from Roy Jenkins, the reforming Labour home secretary and founder of the Social Democratic Party, that the origins of Labour’s relative failure lay in its original sin of failing to unite the Liberal and socialist traditions. Blair put it more pointedly than I had heard from him before: “The big defect at the birth of Labour was to be tied to organised labour rather than to be broadly progressive.”

That prompted some spluttering among Labour MPs who see themselves as on the right of the party but very much in the trade union tradition. “Ahistorical, self-indulgent drivel,” was how one put it to me.

I think what this MP meant to say was that it was a bit more complicated than that. There are many reasons why Labour has been bad at winning elections, and not all of them are to do with the trade union block vote. Ramsay MacDonald defecting to the Conservatives in 1931, for example, or the postwar Labour government exhausting itself and bequeathing a benign period of prosperity to its opponents.

Rather than dwelling on failure, the 25th anniversary ought to be a chance to reflect on the other side of the equation. The most obvious lesson of the long view of history is that Blair was an exceptional leader, and for a long time since he left office the puzzling question was why the Labour Party was so uninterested in learning it.

Indeed, when Prof Davis and I started the “Blair Years” course a year after Blair stepped down, we thought that we might contribute to a rebalancing of the negativity that surrounded Blair’s record at the time it ended. For a long time, we were disappointed, as the hostility towards him continued to gain ground and some of his monuments were toppled. First the golden economic record of New Labour was tarnished by the financial crisis; then the reaction against the Iraq war led to Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader; and finally free movement from day one for citizens of new EU members in 2004 contributed to Brexit.

Since then, though, the tide has turned, and there is a better understanding of the lasting achievements that remain. The list is so familiar that its significance is easily undervalued: peace in Northern Ireland, the minimum wage (combined with full-ish employment), Sure Start, higher standards in schools and investment in universities, the NHS, equal rights. Just imagine if there had been a Conservative government all that time.

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More Labour Party members now have a favourable view of Blair than of Corbyn, according to a YouGov survey last year, which is partly because Corbyn supporters have left and Blairites have rejoined, but also, I think, because minds have been changed on the subject of winning elections. Not that Corbynites ever thought winning was unimportant – the idea that they would rather be ideologically pure in defeat is a Blairite calumny.

But if you think history started in 1997, you might think Labour winning elections is nothing special, and even that the decline since then was reversed in 2017. Which it was, and Corbyn nearly became prime minister, although the idea that a Corbyn minority government propped up by nationalists, Lib Dems and Blairites was going to achieve “transformational” change is unconvincing.

Now, after the fourth defeat, it is as clear as day that it is not so easy. The point was never to win elections for the sake of it – that is a Corbynite calumny of the Blairites – but to change things.

The real lesson of this day a quarter of a century ago is that the Blairite truths are eternal. You win by persuading the other side’s voters to vote for you. You change things by bending the machinery of government to your values and focusing on what works, all the time persuading the other side’s voters to keep voting for you, so that you have more time to act by your lights and keep the other side out of power.

A new understanding is dawning, is it not?