The Tories should support Tony Blair’s magnificent defiance of his own party

The intelligent case for voting for Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001 was simple and very compelling. Only New Labour could bring about deep-seated reform of British public services. The argument went as follows: the Tories would never be trusted to tamper with the NHS or the social security system. Their motives were suspect. The voters were easily convinced that their real agenda was privatisation. Just as Richard Nixon, a Republican president, was the only political leader who could restore relations with communist China, so Labour’s Tony Blair was the only man who could take on the public-sector workers.

All the brightest and best people around the Prime Minister ‘ Geoff Mulgan, Frank Field, David Simon, Andrew Adonis, Peter Mandelson, Roy Jenkins, David Miliband ‘ passionately believed this. So did Tony Blair himself. The bitterest disappointment of the last seven years has been the slow, agonising discovery that this belief was unfounded.