Pinch yourself today, and ask if it can really be true. Labour, the party of the organised working class, seemed supremely fitted to govern in the 20th century, the century of the common man. It failed utterly, winning a significant working majority only twice before 1997. Now, in the 21st century, with the great armies of organised labour - steel, coal, shipbuilding, motor cars - all but extinct, the party dominates the political landscape. Against all expectations, it has become the white-collar party, the party of the suburbs, of the managers, of the smart metropolitans. Tony Blair owes last Thursday's landslide to the middle classes. The Tories, left with the countryside, their traditional working-class vote and a few second-hand car salesmen, have been reduced to a series of naff jokes.
This is an astonishing achievement and, it must be admitted, it owes a great deal to the much reviled spin-doctors and control freaks of Millbank. Beneath the shirt-sleeved glitz of Mr Blair's leadership, Labour, after all, is still recognisably Labour: Gordon Brown, John Prescott, Clare Short, David Blunkett, Margaret Beckett, John Reid, even the ultra-Blairite Alan Milburn, are all figures whom it is impossible to imagine as members of any other party. Several prominent ministers have a history of involvement with CND, with the Bennite factions in the Labour Party or with groups even further to the left. Such political positions are plainly as unpopular with the electorate as they ever were, as evidenced by Arthur Scargill's 912 votes in Hartlepool. Yet during the campaign, the leaders of some of Britain's biggest industries positively welcomed the prospect of a second, decisive Labour victory. Try as they might, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the propagandists of Central Office wholly failed to convince the public that old Labour has been simply biding its time and might soon slip back to its old collectivist ways.
This is because the rupture with traditional Labour values has been comprehensive and brutal. A second-term Blair government may support better funding of public services, but it will not support public ownership; on the contrary, it is determined to extend the role of the private sector. It will strive to redeem its promises to lift children out of poverty, but it will not talk about equality or redistribution. It will design numerous initiatives to raise standards in schools, but it will not act against grammar or fee-charging schools or against covert selection in comprehensives. It will allow modest increases in the minimum wage and equally modest improvements in employees' rights, but it will not reverse the anti-trade union laws of the 1980s. And it is by ruthlessly suppressing all such old Labour talk, by making no secret that it loathes traditional Labour supporters and their values more even than it loathes the Tories, that Millbank has achieved its electoral miracle.
The price has been high; turnout for this election was pitifully low in many traditional Labour strongholds, particularly in the north-east of England. Many may conclude that we have not just a Labour government making the usual day-to-day compromises that all parties make when they are in power, but one that, in effect, has been captured by neo- liberal ideology. After all, it was that most neo-liberal of publications, the Economist, that advised its readers to vote for Mr Blair, on the grounds that he was the best conservative available. The Margaret Thatcher that the Prime Minister disowned during the campaign was not the modernising Thatcher of the 1980s, but a Thatcher who has reverted to a caricature of the twinset-and-pearls Tory lady, wittering on about foreigners, blacks and a country going to the dogs. Yet however we describe Mr Blair's ideology - and a precise prognosis may not be possible until well into the second term - it makes a profound difference that Labour is in power, not the Tories.
The effect of a second Labour victory is to break the British ruling class. All the old networks of the Tory state - the public schools, the country houses, the London clubs, the armed forces, the merchant banks, the hereditary peers, the royal circle - suddenly look dated and irrelevant, condemned not just to a brief holiday from power (which many Tories used to welcome as an opportunity to repair their businesses and bank accounts), but to permanent exile. The codes, the contacts, the values that sustained this governing elite will no longer work.
This is a revolution in British national life, with incalculable consequences. But revolutions do not necessarily lead to the results that their architects and their supporters would wish; indeed, through most human history, revolutions have betrayed the ideals that brought them to power. The battle to ensure that this is not true of Labour's revolution begins now. But for just a few days: rejoice, rejoice!
Hero of the fatherland
Robert Harris, a well-known thriller-writer, is to devote his Sunday Times column to a fearless attack on the paper's owner, Rupert Murdoch. He will expose the media tycoon's monopolistic tendencies, his shameful obeisance to the murderous tyrants of China, his companies' avoidance of UK corporation tax and much else on which the Sunday Times has hitherto maintained a discreet silence. Mr Harris has searched the paper's website and found just 33 mentions of Mr Murdoch in the past 20 months; except for a brief story about a cancer operation and a note of the proprietorial birthday, all were passing and incidental. In Mr Harris's view, this coverage of such a powerful and controversial figure appears craven and cowardly. Further developments are awaited with interest. But everyone should congratulate Mr Harris on his heroic, if belated, stand. (For background, see John Lloyd, "The scorn of the literati", in last week's NS; and Mr Harris's Sunday Times column, 3 June.)
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