TONY THE TORY FILES

Tories back in business (Ed Vaizey, June 24, 2003, The Guardian)

All the signs are that a turning point has been reached in the Conservatives' electoral fortunes - and Labour is doing all it can to help us. After a botched reshuffle, confusion over huge constitutional changes at home and in Europe, and internal division on tuition fees and foundation hospitals, comes Haingate.

The importance of the debate on income tax should not be underestimated. It is the return of old Labour, filling the vacuum created by the absence of any ideological anchor for New Labour. Ministers and ex-ministers such as Charles Clarke, Peter Mandelson and Stephen Byers now find themselves in the old Labour camp, again looking seriously at tax rises. It is the return of the same Kinnock-Smith agenda that failed to convince voters in the 1980s and 1990s.

This is the real agenda of the left. It is so bereft of ideas about how to solve the country's ongoing problems with schools and hospitals, and incapable of hard thinking or creative solutions, that it returns to tax and spend.

Mr. Blair seems to have paid a high price for the war, which is control over his party's basest urges. In order to become a permanent force the Third Way leadership has no other choice but to turn to its real base, conservatives. This was the accidental genius of Bill Clinton, to get himself a Republican Congress in '94 so that he could govern as a Republican, though a randy one. Mr. Blair should borrow a page from that playbook and lead the Tories back to power. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 24, 2003 11:08 AM