http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/13/gordonbrown.labourEveryone wonders how it is that this fearsome election-winning machine, New Labour, which has been pre-eminent in British politics since the mid-1990s, can suddenly have sunk to levels of support not seen since the days of Ramsay MacDonald and the Wall Street crash. Gordon Brown, unsurprisingly, is the obvious answer most people come up with.
But a better answer would surely be Blair, or rather the absence that is Blair. Take him away from New Labour, and what is one left with? He is like a driver who took a bus on a long and hazardous journey without using a map. To begin with, the passengers rather enjoyed the ride, but then they became alarmed and fractious and demanded he hand the keys over to someone else. Now the bus is stuck in darkness and fog and all that the passengers can see out of the window is their former driver cheerfully hitching a lift back to town.
Well, Blair may think, that's their problem, they wanted Gordon and now they've got him, and the worse things get under him, the better I look in retrospect. And things are bad, make no mistake about it. It's not so much a crisis of leadership as a crisis of purpose - of existence, in fact - that has overwhelmed the government. What is this thing called the Labour party for, exactly? One can see why the Tories exist, and why the Liberals have endured. But Labour - this friend of global corporations, this ally of the neocons in Washington, this raiser of income tax on the poor - where is its place supposed to be in the political firmament? With Blair as the charming public face, it all made a kind of sense, just about; without him, it seems merely baffling.
This existential crisis for the government, which is so much bigger than Brown's awkward personality, may be flattering to our former prime minister, and awash with the most exquisite schadenfreude. But in the long run the man whose reputation is really going to suffer by the disintegration of the New Labour project is Blair. For despite the great debits racked up under his leadership - the calamity of the Iraq war, the loss of nerve over the Euro - there was always one great historic credit in the account book: his restoration of Labour as a natural party of government.