By Peter Wilby, a former editor of the New Statesman (THE GUARDIAN, 28/08/06):
The game is up. After more than a decade of new Labour, David Cameron will enter Downing Street in 2009 or 2010. The majority will be slender enough to give Labour hopes of an early return. But Gordon Brown, assuming he has inherited Tony Blair's mantle, will go to run the World Bank or something of the sort, making way for a younger leader who can remake the Labour brand.That is roughly what I see happening over the next few years. There is no reason why you should pay any attention, though my views echo those held by some of New Labour's more thoughtful loyalists since well before the 2005 election. I have a poor record of political prediction, having completely failed, for example, to foresee the Tory victory of 1970.
But for several reasons, my forecast is as plausible as any other on offer and, in the run-up to the party conferences, at least saves us from more speculation on the tediously unanswerable question "When will Tony go?". The latest opinion polls show consistent and widening Tory leads, and a strong enough performance by the Liberal Democrats to steal Labour votes that the Tories haven't a hope of winning.
More ominously for Labour, public confidence in its handling of the economy has dropped dramatically since last year's election. Indeed, according to last week's ICM/Guardian poll, the voters no longer credit Brown for the past nine-plus years of economic growth and a majority deny they have become better-off under Labour. The latter finding, in particular, defies all published economic statistics, but perception is all.
The Tories have still to benefit significantly from the voters' disillusionment with the government - 38% don't know which party would be better at running the economy or don't think either is any good - but they have almost certainly buried their biggest millstone. It is nearly 14 years since Black Wednesday, and the shots of Norman Lamont hurrying in and out of the Treasury as though playing the final scenes of some demented opera.
This accords roughly with the normal cycles of electoral memory. People took about the same length of time to forget Labour's winter of discontent and, in an earlier cycle, postwar rationing and, earlier still, the Tories' prewar record of appeasement and mass unemployment. There comes a point when it's no use reminding voters about your opponents' former crimes, because many will be too young to remember them. And Cameron, knowing that getting rid of negatives is more important in politics than establishing positives, is shedding troublesome Thatcherite legacies, most recently (in his Observer article yesterday), the opposition to Nelson Mandela and the ANC. By 2009, respectable folk will be able to vote Tory again.
There is one other reason - rarely mentioned - to believe that Labour will lose next time. "New Labour" has lost meaning not only because fewer people understand what is supposed to be new about it, but also because this looks like a very old government. Worse, it is not easy to see how, by the next election, it can plausibly make itself look younger.
Of the 23 cabinet members, all but four are over 50, and 10 are over 55. By the next election, they will all be at least three years older. Some, particularly John Prescott, will presumably have retired by then. But it is symptomatic of Labour's plight that everybody canvassed as the next leader - Brown, John Reid, Alan Johnson, Peter Hain, even the left's no-hope candidate John McDonnell - is older than Blair.
A new prime minister could start with a big reshuffle and try to achieve a more youthful look. But where will the new blood come from? Of the four under-50s in the cabinet, Ruth Kelly and Douglas Alexander are 38, David Miliband is 41, Jacqui Smith 43. So there is an enormous age gap between the generation that now dominates the cabinet and the younger members.
Look down the junior ministerial ranks, and the story is much the same. Neither the Foreign Office nor the Department of Trade and Industry has a single minister under 50. Constitutional affairs, work and pensions and the Cabinet Office are among the departments where, as in the cabinet, no minister is aged between 43 and 50.
In other words, Labour has a missing generation. Most junior ministers in their 40s are not well-regarded or well-known. Labour's rising stars - Ed Balls, David Lammy, Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper, James Purnell, for example - are all in their 30s. There is a good reason for this. The formative years for political commitment are those spent at university. Anybody now in their 40s would have attended university in the late 1970s or early 1980s when Labour seemed tired and discredited and all the vitality, modernity and fresh thinking came from the right. It was simply not a good time to be Labour, just as the 1960s, when most of the present cabinet went to university, was not a good time to be Conservative.
Does age matter? I think it does. Labour's lost 40-something generation should now be moving up the ministerial ranks, ready to take senior cabinet positions and give off that air of steady competence, experience and reassurance that is always an incumbent party's biggest asset. Ministers in their 30s, no matter how talented, can easily look out of their depth, as Kelly did at the education department. Politicians are at their best between 45 and 55, the age at which the public expect to see people in positions of authority - in schools, hospitals and private companies as well as in politics.
That is why, despite Blair's inexperience, Labour as a whole looked so instantly convincing when it came to office in 1997. In 2009, however, it is unlikely to have a single prominent minister in that age group. It has a choice between sticking with the present team, with the risk that it will look old and weary, or jumping a generation, with the risk that it will look as green as Cameron's crew but without the promise of a fresh approach.
If it did lose the next election, Labour could return in 2013-15 with a ministerial team that boasted a rare combination of youth, talent, maturity and experience. Barring a revival of Trotskyist entryism in the Labour party or a cleverly engineered Conservative economic boom, I cannot see the Tories being an appealing alternative in the longer term. There is little sign of a new intellectual ferment of the sort that carried Margaret Thatcher to power.
A period in opposition, far from being a disaster, will be the final test of the durability of Blair's historic transformation. In the past, Labour, turfed out of office, would normally lose several consecutive elections; if it won, it was by the slenderest of margins, as in the 1970s. To fulfil Blair's ambition that it should become the natural governing party of this century, it needs to show that it can bounce back quickly from defeat, as the Tories always did in the 20th century, and as Sweden's social democrats still do.
I hardly dare say it - but I'm almost looking forward to a Labour defeat.