More from The Week

Tony Blair’s parting shot to his party — ‘You’re the future now’ — had the ring of irony. Much is uncertain after Labour’s conference in Manchester, not least the Prime Minister’s likely leaving date and the prospects for a full-blown leadership contest. But the notion that this exhausted, introspective and bitter party is ‘the future’ can be dismissed out of hand. Mr Blair’s farewell was a formidable reminder of his performing talents and also of his utility to his party: as we said last week, he has acted for 12 years as a human shield between the public and Labour. Now that he is going, the movement will have to fend for itself without its talented ambassador to the rest of the country.

In Manchester on Tuesday, Tony Blair will deliver his 13th and final speech as Labour leader to the party’s conference.

‘Things need to be different than what they currently are,’ Derek Simpson, the general secretary of the trade union Amicus, said on the Today programme last week. This is a proposition around which the whole country can unite. But there Mr Simpson’s status as national spokesman begins and ends. The former communist is one of the foremost union barons pressing Labour to change direction radically when Tony Blair leaves office. New Labour, Mr Simpson argues, was the problem: it is time to reassert the workers’ rights and to win back the electorate. It should be obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of recent electoral history that his two objectives — socialist and electoral — are not only distinct but utterly incompatible.

‘New, new, new,’ Tony Blair told a meeting of European socialist leaders shortly after becoming Prime Minister, ‘everything is new.’ Embarrassing at the time, that declaration now seems merely a distant and risible memory. For, after nine years, the one thing this administration cannot possibly claim to be is ‘new’. In his original campaign for office between 1994 and 1997, Mr Blair presented novelty as a good in itself. By relabelling Labour as ‘New’, he signalled not only that the party of old-fashioned socialism had changed, but that it offered a fresh and vernal alternative to the Conservative winter.

Given the choice between a drunken Charles Kennedy and a sober Sir Menzies Campbell — to adapt the Times’s famous comparison of George Brown and Harold Wilson — we now know that the Liberal Democrat high command chose the former. There were four frontbenchers gathered in a room in March 2004 when they received first-hand confirmation that they were indeed being led by an alcoholic. This explained his mysterious absences, his slurred words in morning meetings and general level of inactivity. So the quartet, including Sir Menzies, took a unanimous decision: to do nothing. It mattered little. Leadership is not so important to today’s Lib Dems, who have become more of a shapeless organism than a structured political party, thriving in places where one would not expect.

Each autumn the Labour party performs a ritualistic drama. First, trade unionists and left-wingers talk darkly about insurrection at the annual party conference. Blair must go, they say. At conference fringe meetings, such whispers become a full-blown war cry. Next Gordon Brown gives a rousing speech, laying out his rival vision of the future. There is talk of mutiny even as the Prime Minister comes on stage. But as he starts his oration, his audience is quickly spellbound. Rebels fall silent. Then applaud. Then coo. Then everyone boards the train back to London and the new parliamentary term begins. This year the show has finally moved on.

Last weekend I was sternly assured by a shadow Cabinet member that the Conservatives would resist the temptation to attack the government over the terrorism arrests. ‘The only people who benefit when an opposition starts playing politics with the issue are the terrorists,’ he declared. Things must have seemed rather different in David Cameron’s holiday villa in Corfu. A few hours after he arrived at Gatwick airport, partisan hostilities were resumed. Labour’s complaint — that the Tory leader was ‘playing politics’ with terrorism — was as predictable as it was sanctimonious. Since the alleged terrorist plot came to light at 6 a.m. on 10 August everyone has been playing at politics, with varying degrees of success.

Since David Cameron announced plans to change the Conservative party’s logo, derisive suggestions have come pouring in. A white flag to depict ideological surrender, perhaps, a spinning weathervane or a sinking Titanic. There have been so many spoofs that the favourite to succeed the ‘torch of freedom’ — a green tree — also looks like a hoax. It is intended to represent security, environmentalism and Englishness. It is simply bad luck that it is so similar to the national flag of Lebanon. Perhaps there is a subliminal message here. Last weekend, Mr Cameron firmly backed William Hague in saying that ‘elements of the Israeli response [to Hezbollah] were disproportionate... and I think the Prime Minister should have said that’.

The image of Tony Blair and David Cameron exchanging frilly skirts and pearls is certainly arresting, but the Prime Minister’s reference in California last weekend to rampant cross-dressing was, disappointingly, political. For all the comment that his remarks have engendered, however, we have been here before. When the Economist coined the term ‘Butskellism’ in 1954, it was simply observing that, as Gaitskell wrote after being succeeded by Butler as chancellor, the Conservatives ‘have really done exactly what we would have done, and have followed the same lines on controls, economic planning, etc....’ Both parties were effectively interchangeable, working within the same framework of a mixed economy and government responsibility for full employment.

On Monday, perhaps for the first time in his life, David Cameron turned right after boarding an aircraft. There is no business class in the RAF Hercules that ferried him to Afghanistan; to enter it by door rather than by loading ramp is luxury enough, and the only in-flight entertainment is an industrial-strength headset to deaden the sound of the engines. Icebergs aside, this was his first serious foreign trip as leader. Since 9/11, Tory policy on the war on terror — with the exception of Michael Howard’s wobble over Iraq — has been largely inseparable from that of Tony Blair; so much so that the Prime Minister has often left the Commons chamber with the wrong kind of applause ringing in his ears.