There are times when there is no alternative but to throw up one’s hands in despair and just confess that one is not up to the job. A plumber, sent to investigate a problem with the drains, is doing his client a favour if he admits that he cannot identify the cause of the problem. Likewise a doctor who confesses that he cannot discover the ailment that troubles his patient. So too there are times when it is best for a political journalist to come clean and admit to his readers that he is completely out of his depth.
So it is with this Labour conference. It just doesn’t add up. There is something rum going on, though it is hard to say what. The conundrum is easy enough to state. Tony Blair arrived in Bournemouth after the most calamitous summer of his political career. He took his party into a war it hated, on premises that have since turned out to be false. No Labour leader, apart from the reviled Ramsay MacDonald, has betrayed his party on this scale.
And yet Tony Blair entered the conference hall to cheers and left it to tumultuous applause. The Prime Minister’s speech has subsequently been lavishly praised. Commentators, broadcasters, leader columns all seem to agree about this. By Wednesday morning a consensus had emerged that Tony Blair had ‘done the job’. And given that in politics appearance and reality are pretty well identical, I suppose there is no denying that they are right.
But this raises the perplexing question. How did the Prime Minister pull off his amazing feat? The conventional explanation, that the speech did it, cannot be true. Rarely during his increasingly precarious and in many ways disgraceful incumbency of No.
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