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| Blair left Downing Street years ago, but his ghost haunts all our politics | Jonathan Freedland If the child benefit cut is a calculated attempt to provoke the Tory base, then it comes straight from Tony's playbookIs this the coalition's 10p? That's the question Tories have been anxiously asking each other in Birmingham, fretting that George Osborne's abolition of child benefit for the better-off might soon stand alongside Gordon Brown's scrapping of the 10p tax rate as a gross political error, one that hits the governing party's core vote where it hurts. And yet if this is a mistake on a par with Brown's, its genesis belongs elsewhere – in the legacy of the man who has haunted this conference season, looming large over the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Tory gatherings even though he has attended none of them: Tony Blair.To see the connection, take a quick glance at today's front pages of the right-leaning press, a bucket of ordure poured over the coalition's collective head – with the Mail and the Telegraph sent into righteous fury by the child benefit move. That's a new experience for a government that has so far escaped the feral beast in full wrath.It isn't just the press. After five years assiduously spent cultivating female voters, Cameron has suddenly found himself under attack from that most sought-after demographic: mothers of young and teenage children.But is it a mistake? It certainly looked that way, as the prime minister felt compelled to add an unplanned afternoon round of interviews – trying to hose down the fire his chancellor had started – to the circuit he'd already completed in the morning. The series of confused statements, retractions and half-clarifications from a variety of sources, including the children's minister – culminating in the promise of a barely compensatory tax break for higher paid couples – only added to the sense that the policy had not been thought through and that, when it came to damage control, a panicked government was winging it.And yet isn't Osborne the Tories' demon strategist, the man whose 2007 conference speech scuttled an expected general election and scuppered the Brown premiership? Surely he can't have walked into such an obvious trap. Unless this originated in a conscious tactic, aimed at deliberately provoking the ire of higher earners. That way, when Osborne hits the poorest with cuts in the spending review of October 20, he can say he's already whacked the well-to-do – and that, truly, we are all in this together. (Though it always remains possible that by 2013, when the child benefit cut is due, the public finances will have improved so dramatically he won't need to make the move after all.)If this did indeed begin more in conspiracy than in cock-up, a calculated attempt to provoke the Tory base, then it comes straight from the Blair playbook. Nearly three and a half years after he left Downing Street, the former prime minister still exerts a gravitational pull on British politics. His spirit is everywhere, from the conference bookstalls briskly selling his autobiography to the conversations in bars and coffee shops, where talk soon turns to the Blair book, quoted as if it were a sacred text, full of unquestionable electoral wisdom.It's there in the rhetorical styles of all three party leaders raised in the age of Blair: loose and informal in interviews, earnest and achingly sincere in speeches. Ed Miliband may have run for the Labour leadership as the candidate ready to "move on" from the Blair period, but look at the closing lines of his speech last week – "Optimistic about our country. Optimistic about our world. Optimistic about the power of politics." In their verbless urgency they are classic Blair.The former prime minister set a template all his would-be successors now follow: to be a leader is to be a bright-eyed man with young children, eager and colloquial in manner, "y' know" the verbal tic of choice. Watch footage today of John Major and Neil Kinnock and they seem to be from a different epoch.But it goes deeper than style. Take the coalition's move on child benefit. A generation of political leaders now believe what one Lib Dem junior minister told me during his party's do in Liverpool: "True leadership means challenging and confronting your own party." That was the lesson taught by Blair, scorched into the mindset of the political class by his rewriting of clause IV: real generals prove their worth by antagonising their own troops. That's why Nick Clegg gained plaudits for extolling the virtues of so-called free schools and academies – hours after his party conference voted against them. That was why Ed Miliband was damned the following week for saying too much his party actually agreed with. And that was why, if you believe the initial firestorm over child benefit was not entirely an accident, Osborne was quite happy to anger the Mail and the Telegraph, core elements in the Conservative coalition. He was only doing what Blair taught a generation of politicians to do: prove your mettle by sticking it to your own supporters.For Cameron and Clegg, this has tended to come with the territory: the very act of forming a coalition was hard for hardcore Conservatives and Lib Dems to swallow. Automatically, a press corps conditioned always to be on the lookout for a "clause IV moment" praised the two men for their courage, even though their respective parties had precious few options for resistance.For Ed Miliband it poses a danger. Post-Blair politics make it an offence against received wisdom for a party leader to express the views of the people who elected him to that post. It's said to reek of weakness and pandering. It means Miliband will face a machismo test, forced to make a move that will dismay Labour if the press and his opponents are to grant him any respect. He is haunted by Blair's last testament to his party – that if it deviates so much as a millimetre from his New Labour creed, it will be doomed to perennial opposition. Intimidated by the great sorcerer's three election victories, many Labourites will fear Blair is right – and it will require great determination on Miliband's part to defy them.The Blair footprint is even clearer on the coalition. The project that tempts Cameron is the one Blair also yearned for, but which in the end he was too timid to pursue: the grand realignment of British politics. For Blair that would have been an alliance with the Lib Dems to freeze out the Tories; for Cameron, it's the same in reverse.The first phase was modernisation of his party, just as Blair had done; the second was decontamination of the Tory brand, just as Blair had detoxified Labour. Third was the move Blair didn't dare make in 1997, a formal alliance with the Lib Dems. Next comes domination of the centre ground, refashioning the Conservatives so that they are no longer associated with the right but with the sensible middle, the terrain Blair ruled. Scrapping child benefit for higher earners is part of that gameplan, casting off for ever the charge that the Tories only look out for their own.The result is that Blair remains the axis along which British politics measures itself, the point around which everyone else rotates. Miliband will be judged by which elements of the Blair legacy he discards and keeps. Cameron will judge himself by whether he succeeds in realising Blair's objective of dominating the centre ground and marginalising his opponents.One of the new Labour leader's most telling debating lines argued that his predecessors had been haunted by the spectres of the 1980s, chasing ghosts that had long vanished. Without even realising it, he and his counterparts in the other parties are no less haunted – by the man who remains the titanic figure of the age, looming over all of them.Child benefitConservative conferenceTony BlairConservativesGeorge OsborneEd MilibandJonathan Freedlandguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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