Dialogue: What (if anything) is Tony Blair about?

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Tony Blair's father was a Conservative who used to tell him, "Labour holds you back." Looking back, Blair finds that slightly ironic.

Before the war his father had been an ardent Communist and it was in the most regimented conditions imaginable - an army at war - that Blair sen got his break in life.

"He started as a private, ended as an officer, met people he had never encountered before," his son recalled in a speech to his Sedgefield constituents at the beginning of the election campaign.

For all that, the paternal influence plainly haunted the boy growing up in post-war Durham, an old mining town, traditional Labour territory where working people, says Blair, were "staunch supporters of the 1945 post-war settlement."

He talks that way. Whatever was the secret of his inevitable re-election this week it was not demagoguery. If he has redefined social democracy for the world, he has not made it easy.

Blair is a thoughtful politician with the luxury provided to party leaders of thinking aloud. And he has one of those minds that can run on conflicting ideals without feeling the need of a resolution.

The Sedgefield speech was more personal than most. He saw his childhood influences, parental and communal, as a reflection of the great tension of 20th-century politics: the individual versus the collective interest.

Britain's 1945 "settlement" tipped the balance to the collective with the election of the Attlee Government and the growth of the welfare state.

By the time young Blair joined the Labour Party in 1975 governments were bargaining power with trade unions and Britain was the sick man of Europe. He entered Parliament in 1983, the year Margaret Thatcher won her second election as decisively as he did yesterday.

"It was during that time," he said, "that I stopped thinking about politics on the basis of what I had learned and started to think on the basis of what I felt.

"I believed passionately in compassion and social justice yet I knew I wanted, and wanted my family, to be successful, comfortably off, to take pride in individual achievement.

"I felt the absurdity of being opposed to business making a profit when it is only through profitable business that people could be employed. Yet I felt profit wasn't everything a business should be about.

"I knew poor living conditions and education were in part responsible for anti-social behaviour and crime, but I never felt they could be an excuse ... "

There cannot be a sentient human being who would disagree with sentiments such as those but most politicians feel the need to offer voters a resolution. Blair does not. Like Bill Clinton, he employs the rhetoric of compassion for policies that market liberals can endorse.

"I felt about Thatcherism," he said, "it could do it surely without the lack of compassion and social indifference it seemed almost to rejoice in."

In touch with his feelings, Blair decided that "20th-century politics was an aberration." He found his ideological roots instead in "the moderate labour movement and Liberal Party tradition of the 19th century."

So, as it happens, do those he would call Thatcherites. Baroness Thatcher, who also felt her father's early political influence, described his views as "old fashioned liberal."

He won the 1997 election as "New Labour," vaguely seeking a "third way" between socialism and free markets. The phrase is seldom heard now but the quest remains.

"There is much talk in politics of the need for a big idea," he said at Sedgefield. "New Labour's big idea," he declared, "is the development of human potential."

That was "the belief that there is talent and ability and caring in each individual that often lies unnurtured and discouraged ... "

Everyone is for education. It is not going to rattle the foundations of public policy everywhere, as monetarism and market liberalism did.

And still does. The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, in campaign speeches, said: "This, then, is our policy: in every area, not to impede but to enhance competitive forces. The days of Government picking winners, of uneconomic state subsidies and corporate fixes are forever over ... "

British commentators have breathlessly proclaimed the death of the Thatcher legacy in this election, as they have in every election since 1990. Even in her dotage she haunted the campaign.

Blair's classless charm and mental fudge may be more in tune with the times but he governs on Mrs Thatcher's "settlement," as most governments today do.