Peter Oborne

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.

Peter Oborne reveals the scandalous consequences of the government's timid approach to Robert Mugabe, a tyrant who is now creating a famine among his own people This autumn Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, is on the verge of man-made famine. Soon refugees will be pouring out over the borders, above all into neighbouring South Africa. According to the United Nations six million people -half the population - are in peril of undernourishment or starvation. Most famines are to some extent man-made. But very rarely are they created deliberately, as an act of government policy. Stalin engineered a rural famine to exterminate the kulaks in the 1930s. So it is with Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean President. He has already set about eradicating his opponents.

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.