The ghosts return as Brown fights to escape the Blairite past

At the Labour party conference in Bournemouth, Tony Blair was airbrushed out of the picture. But this week Blair’s ghost has returned to haunt Gordon Brown with a new biography of the ex-PM, sniping from the disaffected and the evidence of Yates of the Yard on cash for honours. The challenge now for Gordon Brown is to lay out an agenda that allows new Labour to move beyond its past.

You could have spent the whole week at Labour’s conference in Bournemouth without realising somebody called Tony Blair had ever existed. His face, his ideas, his legacy had all but vanished from the official and fringe literature. He may have been briefly mentioned in speeches, as a play’s director might ritualistically thank the janitor. But not since Trotsky was airbrushed from the Bolshevik photograph gallery has a political leader been so suddenly and dramatically forgotten. It has been Year Zero for Comrade Brown — aptly satirised as the ‘Age of Change’ in Private Eye — with no hint of there having been a preceding era of any value.