On Wednesday May 7, 1997, Tony Blair convened a meeting of the newly elected Parliamentary Labour Party at Church House in Westminster. There were 419 MPs in the chamber, the largest gathering by far of Labour members in history, fizzing with expectation and excitement. But Blair’s message to them was less a rallying cry than a warning. “You are not here to enjoy the trappings of power,” the new PM said, “but to do a job and to uphold the highest standards in public life. You are all ambassadors for New Labour and ambassadors for the Government.” Their power, Blair cautioned, was conditional and perilously fragile: “We are not the masters now. The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people. We will never forget that.”
Well, they have forgotten it, Tony – completely and utterly. Twelve and a half years on, the New Labour class of 1997 is merely one subgroup within a disgraced political class that is daily retreating ever further from reality, seething about the measures that have been taken to clean up the MPs’ allowances system, even threatening, in some cases, not to repay the sums calculated by Sir Thomas Legg’s investigations. Worst of all, our notional representatives seem to have little sense of the damage they are inflicting upon Parliament and the speed with which they are squandering what remains of the public’s trust. They fiddle their expenses while Rome burns.
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