Why Gordon Brown can’t recommend euro entry this side of the election

The late Tony Bevins, whose final public act was to resign on grounds of principle as political editor of the Daily Express the moment Richard Desmond bought the paper, was a close student of New Labour. Not long before he died he set out, in a series of articles which still repay close study, its chief characteristics. New Labour advanced, so Bevins held, by a series of curious, indirect, sideways jerks. Bevins nevertheless insisted that New Labour had clear objectives. The irregular method of progression, he maintained, was merely designed to confuse the enemy. Bevins approved of, or at any rate excused, this stratagem because he shared Tony Blair’s own belief that openness and candour would prove wholly fatal to the New Labour project.

The Bevins thesis has the merit of explanatory utility. It accounts for much that would otherwise remain mysterious about the stuttering trajectory of New Labour’s relationship with the euro.