The Spectator’s Notes | 13 May 2006

Labour has run out of steam. Like the Conservatives after about 1988, they cannot think straight, and they are more interested in their own quarrels than in anything the public might need. Tony Blair is very conscious of the parallels with the 1980s. He says he does not want the disorder and bitterness that followed the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher, but I wonder if, at a psychological level, this is true. Why should he desire a successful handover if he believes that what comes after him will be bad, and if the timing is forced by people who hate him? Like Mrs Thatcher, he has never been rejected by the voters at a general election, so he feels superior to his critics. Political parties are very strange institutions: their greatest energies in the past 20 years have been devoted to undermining the two most successful peacetime leaders in their histories.