More from The Week

Political reporters always overstate the power of personality in politics. Meanwhile, we understate or entirely overlook other factors. We are gripped by surface phenomena and captivated by the gaudy and the transient. The causes we ascribe to great events are hopelessly short-term, inadequate and trivial. We attribute something like mystic powers to the ability of a single individual to change for good and evil the current of affairs. Journalists may write 'the first draft of history'. But we bring to the task the mentality of the City trader, with his tiny attention span, worship of fashion and disdain for underlying values. To take one contemporary example: the political characterisation of Chancellor Gordon Brown in British newspapers.

Blackpool For the last 20 years the annual TUC conference has occupied a subsidiary role in the political season. During 18 years of Tory government, the unions carried no weight. Their autumnal seaside rumblings could be ignored with a clear conscience. Nor did they relinquish this peripheral role when Tony Blair first came to power five years ago. Trade union leaders were so delighted at a Labour government that they resolved to cause no trouble. This was roughly the state of affairs right up to Tony Blair's second election victory in June 2001. It would be wrong, on the other hand, to assume that the unions were of no account during this 22-year period of comparative invisibility. They mattered desperately - but only for Labour.

The greatest part of the Blair premiership has been notable for its sideways, crablike movements. Even on the occasions when the Prime Minister has been clear in his own mind about his destination, he has been opaque with the public at large and even with colleagues. There is an embedded belief in No. 10 that openness about motives or objectives is the same as giving away battle plans to the enemy. This is the main reason why Tony Blair has often dismayed his friends by failing to show leadership - think of taxation, parliamentary reform, fox-hunting and, above all, the euro. He has never moved an inch forward unless there is a ready-made coalition and well-prepared lines of retreat.

Pessimism among Conservative candidates, extending to anguished doubt about their deficiencies as public speakers and their general ability to stay the course, is nothing new. As Chips Channon asked himself in his diary for 20 February 1934: Am I wise to embrace a Parliamentary career - can I face the continued strain? James Willoughby told me today that he nearly gave up his Parliamentary campaign in November, as he just could not stand the ordeal of speaking: when he confessed this to his agent, the man replied, 'Don't let not speaking well dishearten you: I have known candidates who could not even read.

Few phrases in modern political history have done more damage than Margaret Thatcher's notorious remark that 'there is no such thing as society'. It was made to the magazine Woman's Own in 1987, when Thatcher was at the height of her power. It has been used against her ever since. The former prime minister's political opponents have manipulated the phrase to demonstrate that she was heartless, lacking in compassion and believed in an atomistic Hobbesian world where each individual looked only after himself.