Tried but still untested

Blair's genius is in riding the public mood, but one day he'll have to defy it, says Henry Porter

Imagine the Labour Party conference with all its fine stage sets and eager apparatchiks, its New Labour babes and lobbyists, but without Tony Blair. Well, naturally it is unimaginable. The whole thing falls apart without the supreme leader. Policies and direction, appeal and cohesion, would simply disintegrate if Tony wasn't there to tell the party what to think.

Imagine further what Britain would be like if Tony wasn't around to tell us how we feel; if all those years ago he had failed to win a seat before his wife, and in deference to the life of his family had agreed to limit his ambitions to the law courts and the chambers of Lord Irvine of Lairg. That is the more startling conjecture because in the five months since the election the Prime Minister has come to represent and draw on the mood of the country in a way that no other post-war leader has managed. He has become a kind of emotional and aspirational facilitator, the conductor to a powerful and often barely articulated neediness, which has planted him firmly at the centre of the nation's life.

So the Labour Party conference will therefore be a triumph, somewhat on the lines of Caesar's return from Gaul through the crowds of ancient Rome. Like Caesar, Blair brings with him the spoils of victory: a landslide in the general election, rising support in the opinion polls, achievements in Europe and Northern Ireland, an unmemorable budget (the best kind), briskly successful devolution referendums in Scotland and Wales and finally the tutoring of the Royal Family in the modern ways of empathy.

Even in her greatest moments, Mrs Thatcher could never boast such a record, and the crucial difference between the two is that whereas her power came from a divisive approach to British society and from defeating the Argentinians, the miners and the anti-nuclear movement, Blair's derives from this extraordinary understanding of the public mood.

This phrase is used too easily because the public mood is by its nature mercurial and at best only loosely defined. But the Prime Minister is as skilled as a tabloid news editor - in fact more so - in knowing what flickers the public mind. His immediate response after Diana's death enabled and probably encouraged people to express their sense of loss in a way that was highly unusual for this phlegmatic race. But it is not a new talent. Back in early 1993, when John Smith was leader of the party, it was Tony Blair who expressed the nation's shock when the first snatches of film from a security video showed a toddler named Jamie Bulger being led away by two older boys. "We hear of crimes so horrific they provoke anger and disbelief in equal proportions," he said. "These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name."

This marked him out in the public mind as a politician with a difference, and it was the the unabashed moralism of his subsequent interviews on law and order which eventually settled the leadership contest after John Smith's death. The point about the first speech was Blair's interest in the quality and texture of society. With three years of a Conservative government left it was not for Blair to set about reforming British society. Instead he concentrated on his own party and created the template of what he would do in Britain. It is the modernisation, together with moral and spiritual overtones of renewal, which form the essence of Blair's political mission. Nothing in terms of dogma or theory matter as much to him, which is how he struck such a contrast with the Conservatives during the election campaign when his manifesto was in fact rather circumspect and made many silent nods in the direction of practical achievements of the Major and Thatcher administrations.

What was so brilliant about the Labour campaign was that Blair, and his co-architect Peter Mandelson, understood that after so many years of limited and visionless government the country craved modernity and reform, yet still shied from sacrifice. They were able to promise precisely this pain- free revolution because the economy was in such good shape. There were no signs that inflation, interest rates or unemployment were about to rise sharply, and indeed Britain is still producing one of the better performances in Europe.

This is important because Blair's measures to introduce new democratic layers in the United Kingdom, his proposals to reform the House of Lords and modernise the monarchy, could only be interesting to an electorate which had been relieved of financial worry. At the beginning of the Nineties, income, negative equity and job security were the only things people thought about. By 1995 the pressure began to ease. We were able to look about our country with a little more leisure, and were open to New Labour's modernising suggestions. This receptiveness is the key element of the popular mood today, and it perhaps says much about the strength of British democracy that the radical reforms of our arrangements are being undertaken, not in a time of strife and crisis, but in relative peace and prosperity.

So before one gets too sentimental about the change of mood that affected the country over the summer, it is as well to acknowledge that New Labour has taken over in remarkably untesting circumstances.

Blair has benefited from the mood, but in other ways he has helped form it, principally in his own youthfulness and obvious modernity. Unlike John Major, he is the picture of a contemporary leader - someone whom each individual feels he or she could talk to, someone you might bump into at the PTA meeting or the supermarket. He's a nice-looking, clever, faithful husband to whom you could pour out your heart, and indeed his attentive, sympathetic manner encourages you to do precisely that. Despite the unflinching exercise of power (it was Blair after all who sent in the SAS to capture two Bosnian war criminals), he has an appeal adjacent to Robert Kilroy-Silk, or Richard and Judy, which is why it fell to him to lead the nation's mourning four weeks ago and then astutely to reach out to the Royal Family to show how they could follow suit.

Few will deny that Mr Blair is more in touch than any prime minister in the past 50 years. His party political broadcast last week made much of this and also the need for the constant process of reform. After a brief resume of the modest advances made in health and education, the message of the broadcast was that the sacred work must go on and this would only be possible if the public continued to join the crucible of reform - that is to say New Labour.

Blair certainly wastes no time in capitalising on his success, which is wise because the appetite for institutional reform, rather than policy - they are not, of course, the same thing - won't last forever. He would be well advised to start to mistrust the public mood and remember the words of Alcuin, an 8th-century monk who was quoted on the letters page of the Daily Telegraph three weeks ago. "And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to insanity."

There is nothing quite so dangerously complex or changeable as the public mood, especially these days when it is susceptible to daily suggestion from the tabloid press and confession TV. Our mood swings are much more rapid than they used to be, and less informed. We are hopelessly inconsistent - for instance, espousing the renewal of community and spiritual values, but doing nothing in our individual lives to aid these things. We demand better health and education but won't stump up the necessary money. We decry the invasion of the Royal Family's private lives, but insist that they display their grief as we would wish to.

When you come to consider exactly what people want, you can only really detect flares of desire, spasms of emotion, which are as much prompted by the media as by any internal mechanism. Mr Blair's genius has been to ride the mood and to negotiate its inconsistencies. He deserves the reception that will be waiting for him this week, but leadership sometimes requires more than going with the flow. One day he will have to defy the mood.