The leader we deserve

No British prime minister has dominated the landscape so obviously, with so little obvious effort or for so long, as Tony Blair. You can check through the lists fruitlessly as far back as they go to find a comparable example. Maybe Palmerston, who attained power only in ripe old age, enjoyed a comparable period of popularity during the high Victorian epoch, but even that assertion is open to debate.

Before the emergence of Tony Blair, certain rules were assumed to be immutable. It was axiomatic that governments, in-between general elections, faded in the polls. It was taken for granted that the Conservative party was a formidable electoral machine, but within a two-party system. All of these doctrines – the mid-term unpopularity of governments, the inevitability of the Conservative party recovery, the two-party system – have been disproved by Tony Blair. He has established what amounts for the time being to a one-party state.