HE WAS A TORY, JUST AS BILL WAS A REPUBLICAN:

It is often forgotten now, but Thatcher's route to victory in 1979 was built upon the votes of millions of ex-Labour voters. As early as 1975, in her first speech to the Conservative party conference, she had tried to win over the "moderate" trade unionists in Britain: "Go out and join the work of your union", she argued, "go to its meetings -- and stay to the end to learn the union rules as well as the far left know them". And as industrial discontent continued to grow in the 1970s, she argued that most trade union members were aligned with her politics: "First and foremost, they are members of families: mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, who share our values". [...]

Thatcher worked hard to detach the Labour Party of the 1970s, from the idea of the Labour Party of the past. "There used to be a Socialism in this country, a Socialism which valued people" she claimed.  The modern Labour Party, by contrast, was "officious jargon-filled intolerant socialism". And when the votes were finally counted in 1979, the all-important C2s -- the so-called skilled working class swung to the Conservatives by 11%. Rock-solid Labour seats such as Birmingham Northfield, Basildon and Hertford & Stevenage were won over by her arguments. 

It was those voters, the new Conservatives, who Blair believed Labour had to appeal to in the run-up to 1997. John Smith had skillfully manipulated Conservative divisions over Europe and the economy to Labour's advantage. Moreover, he had begun to tap into an obvious mood for change: "I see decline all around me", Smith said in one speech, "graffiti on the walls and a sense of decline and decay; people in sort of huddled ghettos of the poor and the disadvantaged". However, turning conservative discontent with the government into hard, election day votes for Labour had been the party's historic problem. 

Blair, as a candidate, was uniquely placed to reach into those so-called "no-go" areas. As far back as 1982, when he was the unknown candidate fighting the Beaconsfield by-election, he had worked on ways to frame Labour's message to connect with the more affluent, middle-class voters. "You have millions of people out of work which is costing the country a fortune", he argued. "And then you have plant and machines lying idle. It does not add up".

In the 1980s, as the Conservatives firmly established themselves as the party of the new homeowners and the small investors, Blair still found ways of framing their values as Labour's values. When, in 1988, the investment firm Barlow Clowes was involved in a major "bond washing" scheme - that impacted ordinary people's savings -- Blair demanded the government step in to support them. "These are not get rich quick speculators", he argued. "They are Britain's new class of investors, the married couple with an accumulated nest egg, the young couple left a small inheritance, the mineworker or the steelworker left redundant". 

It was an unorthodox approach that soon attracted the attention of Conservative supporting newspapers. As early as 1990, Blair was already being spoken of as a potential future leader in the Sunday Telegraph. "Blair is a throwback to an earlier type of politician", Martyn Harris told his Conservative voting readers. "To the clear-eyed public schoolboy who came down from Oxbridge brimful of social conscience but unhampered by ideological baggage or practical experience".

By 1994, Blair was said to be the person who could reach parts of the electorate that other Labour politicians couldn't. The development of New Labour, the new constitution, the new approach to policy and the new ways of campaigning and communicating were signs that the party had, in Alastair Campbell's words, "changed the party in order to change the country". But perhaps the biggest signal of change was how former Conservatives now lined up to support them.  

In a reversal of what had happened in the 1970s, Conservatives switched their allegiances in droves. In Westminster, Tory MP Alan Howarth crossed the floor, claiming there was "an arrogance of power and a harshness of power within the government which is damaging to our democracy". When Howarth was later selected as the Labour candidate in Newport East, Blair used it to symbolize a change in Labour's approach: "He came over to the Labour Party because he believed Labour had changed". It allowed Blair to pitch his message to the "moderate" and "sensible" Conservative voters: "I think tradition is all that is keeping a significant number of Tories from jumping ship."

As a consequence, Blair won much more favourable press coverage than his predecessors. One of the journalists who offered his support was the heavyweight Daily Mail columnist Paul Johnson. Johnson had been on the left in the 1960s when he had edited the New Statesman. But in the 1980s, he had emerged as the Mail's harshest attack dog against Kinnock's Labour Party, stoking the flames of a culture war each week. But as the Tory party lost its grip on law and order and drifted towards sleaze, he announced that Britain would be safe with Blair. "By instinct and conviction", Johnson argued, "Blair is an old-fashioned English patriot". 

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