The Blairite Coalition

Last week's Spectator editorial, which greatly enraged Lord Tebbit among others, is now online.

It assumes that it is self-evident that there should be only Blairite options on the ballot paper. The Blairite "free" schools proposal was the Conservative Party's only distinctive policy in 2010, and interest in "setting up your own school" has turned out to be negligible. The cruel Blairite targeting of the sick and disabled may yet result in an actual increase in benefit entitlement due to the health-worsening effects of a process whereby private companies are paid by how many people's illness or disability they deny, but are then subject to appeals that are usually successful and which would always be so if people were not often too ill to pursue them by that stage in the proceedings; the question is never asked of why quite so many people are now that ill. The Blairite health policy, a direct contradiction of the manifesto commitments of both Coalition parties, has had to be abandoned halfway through its parliamentary progress. Tellingly, the editorial fails to mention the Blairite war in Libya.

Labour would in any case have won the 1997 Election, and therefore also the 2001 Election. John Smith had been easily on course to do that, before anyone outside the Westminster bubble had ever heard of Tony Blair. In 2005, Blair faced the only "Opposition" that he could still have beaten after the invasion of Iraq, but even then he managed to lose Labour one hundred seats whom any other Leader would have retained, his only ever impact on the outcome of a General Election. In 2010, the party most closely identifying itself with his legacy unexpectedly failed to win. No one seriously doubts that in 2015 or before, the party most explicitly distancing itself from that legacy will win comfortably, perhaps handsomely.

Everyone comes in useful eventually. Even the Lib Dems, a shield against whatever adolescent post-Thatcherite lunacy from the London think tank circuit this Government, like the last one, would otherwise have inflicted on England. And even the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolved bodies, standing reminders to the other eighty-five per cent of the United Kingdom's inhabitants that some people are still permitted to live in a country that is recognisably Britain. When will we, too, have that electoral option? It looks as if we now have. No wonder that both the ideologically Blairite broadcasters and the tribally Tory papers are determined to talk him down in favour of the Heir to Blair, who happens to be the current Leader of the Conservative Party.