The Clinton-Blair Playbook Has Been Junked

MANCHESTER, England—My first party conference was Labour’s, in Blackpool, 2002. Tony Blair was at his zenith, Bill Clinton was the star guest, and Kevin Spacey, accompanying the former U.S. president to England’s depressed northwestern coast, was still a Hollywood celebrity who made politicians look good.

I was there to see Blair. Eighteen at the time, I’d never truly been aware of another prime minister. When I was growing up in a Labour family in Blair’s constituency, Sedgefield, in the northeast of England, he was an ever present figure in my life, before he became one in the country’s.

Back then, he seemed to be image of a modern prime minister—a prototype that others had to follow. There was something prophetic in his sermon (a to say he’d seen him arriving in Blackpool on a television in Paris. Such a scene now seems almost touchingly quaint.