G eorge Orwell said that the supreme political virtue is the "power of facing unpleasant facts". Philip Gould, who died on 6 November, aged 61, had that quality in abundance. His job as Tony Blair's polling adviser, was to tell the Labour Party what it didn't want to hear about people's aspirations and what they were thinking about the defining issues of our time. In an interview with the NS conducted shortly before he died, Mr Gould said that for Labour to succeed again, it had to "win [back] middle-class voters". His critics argued that, in chasing those voters under Blair, the party had become excessively reliant on focus groups and opinion polls. Gould, to his credit, acknowledged where this had led. "If the Labour Party is to move forward," he told the NS, "it needs a more explicit sense of purpose." He was right.