Glory days are over ... Labour needs to reinvent itself

10 April 2012
WEST END FINAL

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By comparison with that golden morning of May 2, 1997, it's a pretty lacklustre result: more than 150 seats down on the 418 Labour MPs who romped home in that dawn of New Labour.

But compared with the apocalyptic results predicted for so long, it's surely the great escape.

Labour has taken a battering, no question. The swing against it was big. Its ability to stay in power is now very doubtful. Dozens of its MPs have lost their seats, including former home secretary Jacqui Smith.

Last night was a far cry indeed from the start of New Labour's ascendancy in 1997, when I listened at the party's election-night bash at the Royal Festival Hall to the surreal Labour wins pouring in — Bournemouth, Finchley, Wimbledon.

Last night brought a different kind of exultation to those of us praying against a Tory victory. For me the high point of the evening (I think I was bundled into a taxi not long afterwards) was Sadiq Khan's stunning win in Tooting, a body blow to Tory hopes in London and a victory for one of Labour's most intelligent and decent ministers.
And as a local boy, I was moved to start tweeting Exeter City chants when Ben Bradshaw held his seat there. Against most expectations,
the most exposed Cabinet minister — and the only openly gay one — had held on.

Indeed no serving Cabinet minister lost their seat, the ultimate humbling blow that the electorate can land on any individual politician. In 1997, Cabinet ministers hardly anyone
had heard of tumbled almost unnoticed among big beasts like Michael Portillo.

In truth, reading the opinion polls over the past few days, it was hard to believe that Labour were heading for a wipeout. At their nadir in 1983, they held on to just 209 seats. Even after the Gillian Duffy debacle, it never really looked like it would come to that last night.

And for a party that nurses an especially tribal hatred of the Lib-Dems, their block to Nick Clegg's ambitions will bring special schadenfreude.

Still, it is hard to see how Gordon Brown can stay as leader. It is his lack of vision and grip that has brought the party to this point.

When he swept into No 10 in 2007, even Blairites who dreaded a lurch to the Left were bemused at the lack of direction. "We thought he had a plan — but then there was nothing," one senior Blairite former Cabinet minister told me the year after Brown's coronation.

I asked one former senior aide of Brown what had happened in the 10 years at No 11 they'd had to formulate an alternative vision. He shrugged: "The battles with Blair just took up so much intellectual energy that there wasn't time for much else."

Brown never did set out a coherent alternative either to Blair or to the resurgent Tories. It is hard to see now what he has to offer his party.

New Labour is dead, not with a bang but a whimper. The party has avoided a rout — but it badly needs to fight back now, and for that it needs a new leader and a fresh vision.

Andrew Neather worked for the Labour Party in 1997 and was speechwriter to Tony Blair during 2001 to 2002.

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