Anthony Giddens tells Fraser Nelson that the Labour project has to ‘restart’ and that Gordon Brown can no longer afford to be a ‘closeted Machiavellian figure’
Professor Anthony Giddens, author of The Third Way and intellectual godfather of New Labour, is a hard man to pin down. After days of radio silence an email arrives confirming he can be interviewed; it’s just that he’s tied up in meetings with Colonel Gaddafi. ‘Am in Libya at the moment,’ it reads. ‘We had a very interesting session here, chaired by Sir David Frost.’ An ordinary weekend jaunt for a sociologist who has, in the last ten years, become a kind of guru to the world.
His 34 books have been published in 40 languages and he has been received everywhere from Washington to Moscow. He was director of the London School of Economics for the first six years of this Labour government, then entered the House of Lords. But for all the time he spent visiting No. 10 Downing Street, he was seldom invited next door. Now, though, he has put his advice in a new book, Over to You, Gordon, designed to map out the way to win a fourth Labour term.
We meet for coffee in a riverside room in the House of Lords, as he explains that victory next time will not be an easy task. Ten years ago, Labour used a new vocabulary and a new mood; Britain has changed again, and the party must change with it. ‘I think the whole Labour project has to restart to almost the same degree as it did in 1997,’ he says. ‘It needs to take the original principles, which it’s fairly faithfully held for the last ten years, and relaunch them. But the same ones — we’re not talking about changing direction.’
His starting point is striking: New Labour has been a remarkable success over the last decade.
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