A quiet yet brutal PM: Attlee's legacy leaves Blair racing time to secure place in history

It's an oddity that when Tony Blair breaks Clement Attlee's record for the longest period of continuous Labour government on Saturday, he will only be doing so because of a political mistake by his predecessor.

If Attlee had been prepared to put up with a majority as small as those Harold Wilson governed with for three of his four terms of office, his record could still be standing for several years to come.

Instead he decided to go to the country in October 1951, a year into his second term, in the hope that he could enlarge his single-figure majority.

Wilson, who was President of the Board of Trade in that government, always blamed the influence of Hugh Gaitskell, Attlee's Chancellor, for being over-fearful that the difficult economic circumstances caused by the Korean War would worsen. In the event Attlee and Gaitskell were proved wrong; not only did Labour lose the election, but raw material prices collapsed from their record high and the incoming Churchill government reaped the advantage.

This fact draws attention to the one unchallengeable area of supremacy Mr Blair enjoys over other Labour leaders, including Attlee; he has secured two landslide victories in a row, something no other prime minister apart from Margaret Thatcher has achieved in the past 100 years.

That isn't controversial. What is, is the comparison between what each did with their victories - which in the case of Attlee's first victory, in 1945, with a national vote share of more than 50 per cent, was also very big indeed.

But first the men. Superficially, there are certainly similarities. Both were privately educated, Attlee at Hailebury and Blair at Fettes. Both qualified as barristers. Neither would have regarded economics as their strongest suit. And neither was notably political, or Labour supporting at school or university. Both were broadly pro-American in their attitudes, Attlee becoming more so as his premiership wore on. Both committed troops to wars started by the US - Attlee in Korea. Both were exposed to serious doubts about how far they exercised influence over the US - in Attlee's case doubts about whether he really stopped Harry Truman allowing the use of the atom bomb against China during the Korean War. Both stayed with their party at decisive moments in their careers; Mr Blair might not have joined the SDP any more than Attlee might have joined Ramsay McDonald's National Government in 1931. But history would have been very different if either had. Even one of the charges levelled by Clare Short against Mr Blair, that he kept the wider Cabinet out of discussion of the Iraq war strategy, could be levelled at Attlee; who kept most of the cabinet out of the decision to proceed with a British nuclear bomb, believing, as he put it many years later, that "some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind".

Attlee also shared with Mr Blair a deep distaste for the long, rambling cabinet discussions that prevailed in the Labour governments in between. John Mackintosh, the author of the standard work on cabinet government, would recall that when in a cabinet meeting a minister would say, "An interesting case occurred in 1929 which was very similar to this and I remember that we..." the famously laconic Attlee would break in: "Do you oppose this? Er ... No? Very good, that is settled."

But herein lies a difference as well as a similarity. For while many, perhaps most, of Mr Blair's key decisions have been taken within very small groups around him, Attlee was a chairman, a delegator who believed strongly in cabinet government and believed that maintaining government and party unity was one of his main jobs. Attlee once said, in an aphorism violated on a more-or-less daily basis by Mr Blair: "It's dangerous to be the centre of a small circle."

He could be a brutal reshuffler, once telling one hapless minister who dared to ask why he was being relieved of his job: "Not up to it I'm afraid." But while Mr Blair has - thanks to the peculiar history and dynamic of his relationship with Gordon Brown - delegated a great deal of economic and social policy to his Chancellor, Attlee did so across a much broader front. This included the biggest man in his cabinet, Ernest Bevin, in foreign affairs. "If you have a good dog," he once said, "don't bark yourself".

And he simply wouldn't have understood spin. It's common to assume that this has more to do with the times than the man. And certainly no modern PM would get his wife to drive him round the country at breakneck speed during election campaigns, as Vi did in the family Ford Prefect. But even by the standards of his contemporaries, he was a conscious study in anti-charisma - never, as one observer noted, "using one syllable where none would do". After his astonishingly big victory on 26 July 1945 - which he acknowledged to his diary had been "quite an exciting day" - he celebrated by taking tea with his wife at the Paddington Station Hotel. He then went to the Palace where a painfully taciturn conversation ensued with King George VI: "I've won the election."

"I know. I heard it on the six o'clock news."

Compare that with the shenanigans at the Royal Festival Hall or the flag waving in Downing Street in May 1997.

This was a man who was only persuaded to instal a news ticker-tape machine at No 10 on the grounds that it would give him his beloved cricket scores - and then expressed horror when he found it spewing a few anodyne outlines of cabinet decisions.

There were also deeper differences in the backgrounds of the two men. Although both were irredeemably middle class, Attlee came to his socialist convictions through prolonged exposure to the problems of the urban poor, first as the manager of the Hailebury boys' club in Stepney, east London, and then as a councillor. He had also seen the horrors of war at first hand - as an officer in the South Lancashire Regiment he served in Gallipoli, and in what is now Iraq - where he was wounded by "friendly fire" - and Passchendaele. Finally, Attlee was, in Peter Hennessy's words, "the most left-wing prime minister Britain will produce in policy matters and the most socially conformist in personal ones".

So what had each achieved when the six years were up? Mr Blair was quite right last month when he cited a 1954 New Statesman profile, claiming the 1945 government "contributed almost nothing new or imaginative to the pool of ideas", to show that many on the left didn't worship the Attlee government at the time any more than they do the current one now.

Even now there are dangers of over-sanctifying its memory. As Alan Watkins has pointed out, Attlee's acceptance of a US loan after the end of wartime lend-lease imposed on Britain a heavy price - what Harold Wilson would call "a burden on Britain's balance of payments right into the 21st century". It's true, too, that for better or worse, many of the industries Attlee nationalised have now reverted to private ownership. And the Attlee government was certainly no more liberal on law and order issues - rather less so if you take into account its preservation of the death penalty - than Mr Blair's.

But the achievements were formidable. Beside the nationalisations, the end of empire in India, co-operation in the Marshall plan, the formation of Nato and above all, the creation of the NHS. Against it, Mr Blair and Mr Brown are entitled to pitch the independence of the Bank of England, a strong economy, the minimum wage, undoubted success in the war in Kosovo, great progress in Northern Ireland, some real redistribution, some liberalising social legislation, and the biggest programme of constitutional change in this century.

What the Blair Government hasn't yet achieved is the kind of longstanding transformation which prompted Nigel Lawson, one of the Attlee government's Tory critics, to acknowledge that its "two key principles ... big government and the drive for equality" had "remained effectively unchallenged, the very heart of the post-war consensus" until large parts of it were unravelled by Mrs Thatcher. Very few governments set a whole era in being in this way.

For the Blair administration to do this, it would need to so improve public services as to ensure that privatisation went off even the Tory agenda for the next generation; settle once and for all Britain's place in Europe; and perhaps fulfil some of the promises of the new, open, pluralist politics that Mr Blair made when he came into office. Maybe it isn't yet impossible. But it has become a race against time.