It’s all Tony Blair’s fault – but not in the way Labour thinks

He showed the Tories how to win, yet his own party failed to learn the lesson

You only get one chance to make a first impression. A cliché, but a powerful one – because it’s true. Impressions matter: in a busy world, most people don’t have the time to devote to finding everything about everybody. They judge and move on quickly. Malcolm Gladwell has written a whole book on this – Blink – setting out in detail why this is a fundamental and fundamentally useful human characteristic.

In politics, which above all is about perceptions, this matters massively. Leadership goes to judgment and judgment goes to character. It can often hurt profoundly.

Ed Miliband never shook off the accusation that he was ‘‘the wrong brother’’. Fair or not, it was the judgment that stuck. It’s as bad for a political party as it is for a single politician. Worse in a way, because individuals struggle to wipe out a bad reputation earned collectively.

Labour’s interim leader, Harriet Harman, learnt this the hard way. First elected to the Commons in 1982, she saw how long it took for Labour to restore itself after the Bennite madness of the early Eighties. That’s why after this year’s election she was so quick to resolve that Labour had to show the public it got the message over welfare and that it would not automatically oppose all the Conservatives’ welfare changes. Harman remembered the impotence of perpetual opposition and wanted to settle with the public quickly so that Labour could move on to attack the Government for what it was doing to make work pay less, to take £1,000 a year from the poorest households and to increase child poverty.

Instead, Labour defaulted to its safe place – disunity – and proceeded to form a circular firing squad. The smug, self-congratulatory, self-indulgence of the Labour Left was a joy to hear for George Osborne. And for once I agree with Jeremy Corbyn and his followers, the so-called Jezbollah: Tony Blair is to blame. Not in the mindless “Tony Blair was a Tory because only Tories win elections so Tony must have been a Tory because he won three of them” kind of way. But in a different way: why has the lesson of electoral success apparently been so easily lost by so many intelligent people?

Perhaps it’s best to start at the beginning. When does Labour win? Whenever it proves to the voters that its head will rule its heart. British politics is actually pretty easy to understand. The public trust the Tories on the economy and trust Labour on the NHS. All you need to do to win an election is to neutralise your negatives and let your positives do the work.

So the Tories need to convince voters that they will look after the NHS. That’s why they promised £8 billion extra for health spending during the election. Where’s it going to come from? Who cares? The Tories know how to run an economy, they’ll find it. Labour, on the other hand, needn’t waste time on promising to protect the NHS or scare-mongering on it. It should have grabbed the £8 billion promise, promised to match it, and kept on reassuring the electorate on public spending, the economy and immigration. In that context, what Osborne is trying to do on welfare is blindingly obvious. And what Labour should do is equally obvious.

Blair understood instinctively that British politics is a battle between head and heart. The public see Labour as soft-hearted by nature – which they like – but soft-headed too – which they don’t. Faced with a Labour Party like that they will vote for a Tory government because it is hard-headed, and they will not care if it is also hard-hearted.

Blair’s genius was to see that the government that Britain has wanted since the war – and voted for when given the chance – is a hard-headed but soft-hearted one. That was why when Blair proclaimed himself ‘‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’’ he won Middle England. At last, a leading Labour figure who understands that crime is real and needs to be tackled, but that punishment is not the only thing needed – deterrence, diversion and rehabilitation are an essential part of it, too. Hard-headed but soft-hearted – the government that Britain needed then and still wants now.

So why do I say Tony Blair is to blame for where Labour now finds itself ? Because leadership is about legacy as well as action. A legacy of priorities? Here Blair triumphed, placing child poverty, aid, health and education at the centre of politics. A legacy of institutions? Again a triumph with the Human Rights Act, Supreme Court, the Northern Ireland peace deal, devolution to London, Scotland and Wales. A legacy of cultural change? Another success – equal marriage on its own shows a Britain at ease with itself.

But a legacy of political change? Here’s the rub. Blair transformed the Tory party, but not his own – at least not enough. The Tory embrace of equal marriage is a Blairite triumph, but so is the Conservative adoption of his health and education reforms – and even his former advisers, as with Simon Stevens, now chief executive of NHS England.

It is the Labour Party which wants to revert to the old Adam. The purity of powerlessness. The celebration of defeat. The Millwallisation of politics – ‘‘No one likes us, we don’t care!’’

Changing your own party is harder than changing your opponents. Margaret Thatcher found that. The party she loved and led only triumphed as a centrist Blair-lite one. The problem is that while a politician’s virtues have clarity to their opponents, for their supporters there are much more mixed feelings. Had more Blairites stayed on in 2010 – John Hutton, Alan Milburn, John Reid and Patricia Hewitt – things might have been different. They didn’t and it wasn’t.

The resistance of Labour MPs to Harman’s sensible political tactics is telling. They mounted the most substantial Labour rebellion for years. The new Labour leader – whoever it is – will have a tough job, but they don’t have to look far to find a strategy for electoral success. Tony Blair showed them how: they just have to do it again. Hard heads and soft hearts will always beat hard heads and hard hearts. John McTernan was political secretary to Tony Blair 2005 -2007