Labour’s new party trick

REMEMBER the Labour Party? Remember when it enjoyed a miraculous revival, at roughly the same time as platform shoes, Pez dispensers and Katrina and the Waves? Remember when – get this! – it actually made itself electable?

No, I’ve not been on the sherry again, this really did happen.And to remind us how, we have a tremendous new series, BLAIR & BROWN: THE NEW LABOUR REVOLUTION (BBC2, 9pm), reliving the whole story.

Not that the “how” is all that hard to explain. Essentially, what Labour did, when Tony Blair took charge, was rebrand itself. Not just by swapping its red flag for a red rose and slapping “new” in front of its name, as if it were Persil Non-Bio, but by effectively completing the job begun by former leader Neil Kinnock when he’d first stood up to the crackpots in its ranks.

“No longer,” Labour was effectively now assuring us, “will we let ourselves be steered by the politics of the utterly loopy. Well, not for another couple of decades…”

But the programme starts with a reminder that this was no overnight transformation.The New Labour story here begins not in May 1997, when Blair was swept to power, but 14 years earlier, when both he and Gordon Brown, aged 30 and 32 respectively (and each looking as though he’d still be asked to show his ID whenever he ordered a lager shandy), first became MPs.

That 1983 election was still a car crash for Labour, as Maggie Thatcher’s majority more than tripled. But the two men who would one day be key to the party’s revival at least now had a foot in the door.

With five hours of airtime to play with, this series (from the same people who brought us the equally absorbing Thatcher: A Very British Revolution) is under no pressure to rush through what came next.

Thank goodness, because there’s so much here to consider, so many twists and turns whose significance can’t simply be glossed over.

At its heart is the shifting relationship between its protagonists, both of whom we hear from at length.Their political friendship (whatever one of those is) came under increasing strain as each became convinced he’d one day be the man for the top job.

Years on, the cracks clearly remain.

But it’s the other contributors, particularly former prince of darkness Peter Mandelson, whose observations add context and perspective.

“What Gordon had,” Mandelson recalls of those early New Labour days, “was a terrific, 24/7 ability just to tear into the Tories.

“But Tony was actually asking himself whether there weren’t some things the Tories had perhaps got right…”