Politicians like to see themselves as shaping the future. Historians sometimes collude with them. Yet, often, the skill of political leaders lies in accommodating themselves to their environment, rather than transforming it. There are, to be sure, occasions on which political leaders wrench history from what seemed to be its preordained course: an obvious example is Churchill in 1940. More often, however, the art of political leadership consists in giving a gloss to the inevitable. That is why biographies of prime ministers so often mislead.

In considering the ‘Blair effect’ upon social democracy, it is tempting to assume that Tony Blair almost single-handedly transformed the ideology of the Labour Party. Perhaps his art, however, has consisted less in transformation than in adapting Labour to changes that had already occurred in British society and in the global economy. Perhaps his skill lay in enabling Labour to administer a Thatcherite dispensation more efficiently but also more humanely than the Conservatives themselves were able to do; just as Harold Macmillan in the 1950s had been to administer the Attlee dispensation more effectively than the Labour Party.