12 MAY 2007, Page 5

Goodbye to all that

It ends, as it began, with a political conjuring trick. The splicing together of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness must, by any standards, rank as one of the most extraordinary achievements in recent politics, and reflects, among other things, the sleepless kinetic force that was Tony Blair’s greatest asset.

It was the same force that pushed through the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, as Mr Blair promised to reconcile the irreconcilable, square the circle, plot the uncharted ‘Third Way’. In Ulster, he has been rewarded. But the method failed him more often than not.

Even before he was elected, the Labour leader swore that he could pump money into Britain’s public services without raising taxes: more than 100 tax increases later, those words seem laughable. He promised to encourage social mobility, yet abolished the Assisted Places Scheme that enables less affluent children to enjoy the benefits of private education.

He claimed to understand the rising expectations of patients as taxpayer-consumers, yet left in place an NHS that is still, in essence, a horrifically unwieldy centralised bureaucracy. He always believed that he could persuade anyone of anything, a delusion shattered by the failure of the second UN resolution on Iraq in 2003. Swept to power by (among other things) public disgust at Tory ‘sleaze’, he promised to be ‘purer than pure’. Yet his decade in office was disfigured by scandal: Ecclestone, Hinduja, Mittal, ‘loans-for-peerages’. As is clear from our special supplement this week on the Blair years, the gap between claim and reality opened up quickly and was soon a yawning gulf.

What should not be in doubt is the sheer scale of his achievement as a political operator. He achieved an aggregate of parliamentary majorities greater even than Margaret Thatcher, saw off four Tory leaders and transformed Labour from a party that had lost four successive elections into a ferociously effective political organisation. He drove the Conservative party, in 2005, to elect a young leader who styled himself ‘Blair’s heir’.

Nor should his accomplishments on the international stage be ignored. In Sierra Leone and Kosovo, he displayed guts and moral tenacity. And whatever the errors of Iraq — and they were colossal — he had the courage to confront the new challenges of the post-9/11 world and the wisdom to see that the geopolitical landscape had changed fundamentally.

Yet the main story of the Blair years is one of dashed expectations and disillusionment. No Prime Minister in modern times has been elected on such a wave of optimism and expectation. He promised a ‘New Britain’, a ‘new dawn’ in which Britons could expect radical improvements in their quality of life and would not have to settle any longer for third-rate public services.

Yet — as we showed in an audit of Mr Blair’s education policy this February — his reforms of the nation’s schools were halfbaked, expensive and ineffective. On health, as The Spectator’s new blogger, Stephen Pollard, argues in today’s supplement, colossal sums were spent, and yet productivity fell and reform stalled. Before 1997, Mr Blair used to deploy the familiar ‘Nixon in China’ argument to claim that only a Labour government could end the terrible scourge of welfare dependency. In this case, to extend the metaphor, New Labour’s Nixon came back empty-handed. Part of his bequest is a client state in which 2.5 million people have been on benefits for five years or more and — insanely — the system offers incentives for couples with children to live apart. By any meaningful measure, social mobility is in decline.

The pattern of the Blair years was depressingly repetitive: the Prime Minister would diagnose a problem, promise radical action, and then retreat from the ‘hard choices’ he claimed to relish. Often, this reflected a reluctance to engage in all-out confrontation with Gordon Brown — over foundation hospitals, city academies and university top-up fees, for instance. But such episodes merely diminished faith in Mr Blair’s leadership: if Mr Brown was indeed the problem, as No. 10 spin doctors claimed, why did the PM not sack him?

In other areas of policy, common sense clashed with liberal orthodoxy: Mr Blair could see that violent crime was a huge and pressing problem, that the public felt unsafe on the streets and that, in crucial respects, the criminal justice system had lost touch with the anxieties of the ordinary citizen. Yet he did not address the crisis in prison capacity, failed to deport hundreds of foreign prisoners and created the scandalous Early Release Scheme. It is a shame that John Reid, one of the few ministers to grasp the scale of this problem, and to have a true capacity to connect with the electorate, has decided to leave the government at the same time as Mr Blair.

The gap between rhetoric and delivery was always too great, which is why the words ‘New Labour’ and ‘spin’ became inseparable. This was a Prime Minister who would go to any lengths to persuade doubters that he was right — with disastrous consequences in the case of the Iraq dossiers. Statistics were announced and re-announced, to the point where they became meaningless. Trust not only in New Labour, but in the political process as a whole, declined perilously during the Blair era: a daunting problem for Mr Brown and his successors.

The contrast between the hope of 1997 and the disillusionment of 2007 could scarcely be sharper, and will be puzzled over by historians of the future. It used to be said that Labour governments always run out of money — and the public finances are certainly full of holes. But money was not Mr Blair’s greatest problem. Instead, he ran out of road, squandered the public’s hopes and, on most fronts, remained stuck in the rhetorical departure lounge. ‘Today, enough of talking,’ he said on the threshold of No. 10 on 2 May 1997. ‘It is time now to do.’ Alas for him and for the country, that time never truly came.