Tony Blair – The UK’s Obama.

He is not the villain of this story either. He is its most elegant European expression – the long march rebranded as modernization, delivered by a man so gifted at the aesthetics of the new that nobody noticed how old the project was.

1. He arrived in 1994 as the leader of a Labour Party that had lost four consecutive elections. What he offered was not socialism – he was too clever for that. He offered the third way: the progressive project stripped of its rough edges, repackaged for the professional class, delivered in the language of competence and modernity. New Labour. The name was the program. Everything that had made Labour unelectable was old. Everything Blair offered was new. The content was largely the same. The packaging was revolutionary.

2. The rhetorical genius was real. He could make the correct position feel like common sense, make the opposition feel not just wrong but somehow embarrassing, make voting Labour feel like joining the future rather than the past. "Things can only get better" was the campaign song. It was also the complete statement of the cultural hegemony achieved: the existing order was not just wrong, it was over. History was moving. The question was whether you were on the right side of it.

3. The institutional transformation was thorough and deliberate. Thirteen years produced: the Human Rights Act embedding European legal frameworks into British law, the devolution settlements fragmenting British sovereignty, the Supreme Court replacing the Law Lords, the civil service transformed, the BBC consolidated as the cultural apparatus of the new consensus, the public sector unions embedded as a permanent political constituency. The ratchet, applied with more sophistication than any previous British government.

4. The conservatives who followed spent a decade trying to reverse it. Cameron, May, Johnson – three prime ministers, three different styles, one shared achievement: they maintained what Blair had built while pretending to oppose it. This is what the ratchet looks like from the other side. You win the election. You do not win the institutions. The civil service thinks differently. The courts think differently. The BBC thinks differently. The universities think differently. You govern inside a framework designed by your opponents – and slowly, without noticing, you begin to think inside it too.

5. He left office in 2007 significantly richer than he entered it, which he achieved with a speed and comprehensiveness that impressed even people who disliked him. The lecture circuit, the consultancies, the memoir, the foundation. The man of the people became a remarkably successful business. The standard trajectory of the long march’s most successful products – who discover upon leaving office that the network they spent their careers building is also an extremely effective commercial infrastructure.

6. British politics runs approximately ten years ahead of American politics. Blair was Obama before Obama – the gifted communicator, the third way branding, the institutional transformation beneath the aesthetic, the network that outlasted the administration.

After Blair came Brown – the placeholder who discovered the machine was harder to run than to inherit. Like Biden, he was in the room. That was no longer enough.

After Brown came the conservatives – who couldn’t reverse the ratchet and didn’t really try.

And then came Starmer.

Keir Starmer is what the long march looks like when it no longer needs the gifted communicator. When the institutions are sufficiently captured, the inspiring leader is optional. You need someone who will maintain what was won – and take it further, quietly, without the poetry, without the charm, and without the need to persuade anyone of anything.

The Red Brigades with a budget and a parliamentary majority.

British politics is ten years ahead of the U.S.

That is, if you do not ACTIVELY choose to change the course of history…