The Blair revolution revisited (dedikált példány) [antikvár]

Introduction Rt Hon. Peter Mandelson MP Where it started The Blair Revolution was written in the heyday of New Labour, when all lay before us. This was a time of excitement when, for the Labour Party, there certainly was a 'revolution' under way. The sacred texts of the party's constitution had just been rewritten; stances taken since the 1970s were being scrapped and policies refashioned. New members were flooding in, and this book was an attempt to make sense of it all and give the emperor — the party, that is, not its leader — some clothes to wear and a route map to follow. In those days, nobody imagined that we would get as far as we have. The party's new ideas were untested; our plans bore the mark of eighteen years of Opposition; our would-be ministers were untried. The constant fear was of a repeat of 1992, that the Tories would engineer some magical last-minute revival and, as a result, the fragile creation of New Labour would come crashing down around our ears. To describe us all as neurotic is an understatement. No detail was too small to pick over. No journalist was too obscure to cultivate. No dissenting voice was too weak to worry about. Blair strategy memos (written on a Sunday and discussed en groupe on Monday), speech drafts, focus group feedback and political broadcast scripts abounded. Hardly a day passed without some fresh attack being launched on the Tories or some fresh positioning of Labour taking place. It was a period of intensely creative, and enjoyable, political activity. The Millbank team gelled and turned itself into a Rolls-Royce machine. Nothing was ever taken for granted. But in the months leading up to the general election of 1997, the quiet expectation of office grew - at long, long last. The purpose of this introduction to The Blair Revolution Revisited is not to trawl back in detail over all of the last five years since the electoral earthquake we unleashed - the scale of which staggered us all. Readers can judge for themselves how far the prospectus of the book has been