PROFILE OF THE YEAR: Tony Blair: Blair's course set for a historic mission

This was the year when Labour's new leader needed to prove himself. In doing so, he has earned his party the right to govern once more.

There are no paintings in the Commons office of the leader of the Opposition. The single, rather bedraggled plant that used to stand in the corner has long gone. It is as if the leader has resolved never to make himself comfortable in a job whose sole purpose is to secure a completely different one.

When he moved in, in July 1994, Tony Blair chose the less prepossessing of the two offices available to the Opposition; the grander upstairs room previously occupied by John Smith is now John Prescott's. As it happens, this plainness is deliberate; the room is a symbolic reminder to those around him that this isn't a job to get used to.

And whatever the result of the election, Blair isn't going to be there for long. It is unfashionable but sobering, given the party's consistent 30-point lead in the opinion polls, to consider for just a moment what hopes and fears will be extinguished if he fails, finally, to become Prime Minister. It would certainly be the end of his own political career. In the Kinnock era, moreover, there was a choice of leaders in waiting. A Blair defeat, by contrast, could be the end of the road. Having run out of alibis, Labour might prove finally to have been unable to outlive the century that gave birth to it.

It is a measure of Blair's achievement so far that no one in his own party now believes that this is going to happen. History will surely judge that while 1994 was the year Labour merely chose a new leader, 1995 was the year it visibly transformed itself - as anyone who experienced the electric atmosphere of those Clause IV meetings of party members in hotel conference rooms up and down the country can testify. At St Helens back in March, for example, you could feel, amid the laughter, the ripple of slightly guilty self-recognition that went through the audience as Blair recalled how one party member had complained to him: "Even Tories are starting to vote for us now."

But there was an even more radioactive moment when one party member in his sixties asked Blair bluntly if he was "just doing all this to win?" Well, he replied, that wasn't such a bad aspiration for a leader. But no, it wasn't the only reason - or even the "primary" reason. It was more that Labour would not win by saying things that it did not believe in.

This goes to the heart of why Blair has been so infuriated by what he perceives to be the conclusions of the compulsively watchable recent BBC 2 series The Wilderness Years: that idealistic socialism is what Tony Benn stood for; idealism that has had to be ditched to make the party electable again. It is true, of course, that since long before he became leader, Blair was more focused than any of his front-rank colleagues on the cold statistics of the electoral mountain Labour had to climb. Was it not Blair who, famously unimpressed by opinion polls, repeatedly pointed out in private that in the 1992 election the party had secured a lower share of the vote than when it was defeated in 1979? But at meeting after meeting in the spring, when Blair was successfully cajoling his party into replacing Clause IV, his message was that there was more to this than mere winning; that it was time to end the historic conflict between what Labour had seen as its "principles" and what it had to do, or rather sell, in order to win power. What Blair set about this spring was to join, for the first time since the end of the 1945 government, principles to practice, the party's activists to its supporters in the country, and himself to the party - or, as he would term it, the head to the body.

As he suggested in the most important article he wrote in 1995 - an Observer piece earlier this month - this was more than a generation overdue. Some within the Party, he said, had vainly tried in the late Fifties to force Labour to adapt to the social and economic changes that had already taken place. What actually happened after the 1959 election defeat was that the modernisers of their day, such as Douglas Jay and the then leader, Hugh Gaitskell, promoted a new Clause IV only to be beaten back by an alliance of the unreconstructed left and the right-wing trade- union barons on whom they had been forced to rely to keep the left at bay.

There is an interesting point here. Much of the genesis of Blair's ideology belongs to the revisionist right of that period. But not all. Those in the Campaign Group who accuse him of being the most right-wing leader Labour ever had should recall that it was the centre left that were historically most distrustful of the power the union barons wielded in the party. As John Rentoul points out in his biography of Blair, Barbara Castle was in favour of one-member, one-vote democracy in the Forties. And it was Castle who, more than a decade before Thatcher, had the courage to try to reform the unions, only to be shamefully deserted by Jim Callaghan and the Labour right.

What the Clause IV meetings showed, ironically, is the gift that Tony Benn, one of Blair's sternest critics, once generously ascribed to another great enemy, Margaret Thatcher - that of politician as "teacher". What Blair's triumphant change to the party constitution seemed to leave open, however, was how far the new ideology - neither "old left nor new right" as Blair continually describes it - translated itself into policy.

That doubt was most graphically expressed in a brilliant Steve Bell cartoon which showed Bambi on horseback trailing a banner with the slogan "Principle Liberated from Particular Policy Prescriptions", a phrase Blair had actually used shortly after becoming leader. It's true that Blair had always thought the problem with Labour was that it had too many policies - for everything from "stray cats to world disarmament" as he once put it - rather than too few. But there is a danger of exaggerating the alleged absence of a programme: a Britain in which state schools are to set new standards of excellence, and where there is widespread constitutional reform, a minimum wage, a radically reformed welfare state, a new regime for the monopolies, a start for the young unemployed and a reformed tax system, is a very different Britain.

But leadership involves strategy as well as ideas. Blair does not underrate John Major's ability to win elections and advises his colleagues not to do so either. The positive press he has had (think how the tabloids would have treated Neil Kinnock sunning himself in Australia while Britain froze) hasn't been a mere accident. He risked internal criticism to speak at Rupert Murdoch's famous seminar in July, partly because it was an unrivalled international platform; but partly because he knows the Sun is the paper that can do him most damage. He has played his own part in getting on warm terms with Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail. But he did deals with neither man.

Part of his strength is that he remains solidly grounded in a life outside politics. He retains old friends, such as his university mentor Peter Thomson, with whom he is currently staying on holiday in Australia. He goes home at night; frequently leaving at 7pm to see his family, and as a matter of routine getting back to Islington between evening votes at the Commons; like Thatcher, he is not in love with the Palace of Westminster. Ferociously in demand - not least in the world of big business - he dines out perhaps three times a week. He reads, having recently finished Roy Jenkins' biography of Gladstone. He still follows the rock scene. He plays tennis with his normal fierce competitiveness and he still takes his children swimming regularly. He retains an ability to laugh which Kinnock began to lose in the gruelling period of his own leadership. He is, for example, a cruelly accurate mimic, able in private to take off most of the shadow Cabinet to a tee.

And there is a pleasant informality about him. He hates wearing black ties, or indeed any kind of tie when he is off-duty. His emphasis in his speech to the Murdoch seminar in Australia, on breaking down the barriers that prevent Britain becoming a true meritocracy, reflect his healthy and rather Thatcher-like mistrust of the crustier aspects of the British establishment.

This raises the big question still lingering in the minds of some in the party: how genuinely radical is Tony Blair? By seizing the ground of "one-nation" politics he believes he has given the centre, as well as the left-of-centre, a new ideology. That centrism inevitably invites comparison with the one-nation Tories whose politics in several respects overlap with his.

But Blair believes there is a fundamental difference: while they are paternalists locked in a losing battle to retain and conserve institutions such as the welfare state, he is about change and transformation. His capacity to modernise Britain as he wants remains untested; all that can be said is that if he can do to the country half of what he did this year to his party, he will be well on the way to fulfilling what he sees as his historic mission.