Tony Blair is guaranteed a favourable place in the history books so far as his electoral record is concerned. He was the first Labour leader to lead his party to three electoral victories in a row. On the first occasion, in 1997, he secured an overall majority of 179, the biggest Labour majority ever. If the twentieth century had been predominantly a Conservative one, Blair apparently gave his party a head start in making the twenty-first century a period of Labour dominance.

This success was achieved following a transformation of the party that was instigated by Blair in the early years of his leadership. Ideologically, the party moved to the right, symbolised by the abolition in 1995 of Clause 4 of its constitution, which committed the party to ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. The party rejected the ‘socialist’ position that the state should own and run the country's major industries and instead embraced the market. As well as being repositioned ideologically, the party was ‘rebranded’ as ‘New Labour’, a description that was designed to symbolise the degree to which it had cast off. its ideological past.

For many of Blair's followers the two events are not unconnected. Labour's unprecedented success in 1997 and thereafter only came about, they believe, because the repositioning and rebranding of the party enabled it to reach parts of the electorate amongst whom hitherto it had been relatively weak.