Following the recent British Labour Party conference, Chris Sheil suggests that Tony Blair will be gone by Christmas. In these narrow personal terms, I’mnot sure. Most commentary suggests that his position was somewhat strengthened. More importantly, Blairism is gone already. Back in 2001, I argued that, in substantive terms, the Third Way was already dead. After the recent conference this fact is right out in the open. Its most noteworthy feature was not the debate over Iraq, but the fact that Gordon Brown felt free to give a speech in which he mentioned Labour and its traditions 57 times and failed to use the phrase New Labour even once.

This doesn’t mean that Brown is a Labour traditionalist in the mould of, say, Harold Wilson or Michael Foot. He is for example, an enthusiastic supporter of the Public Finance Initiative. But if we look back to 1997, the change in palpable. At that time there were two competing interpretations of Blair’s New Labour government. The critics, on both the right and the left, saw Blair as putting a humanitarian face on Thatcherite policies. The Blairites saw the government as something entirely new, transcending the sterile ideologies of the past.

The shift to the left on economic and social policy since then has been gradual, and far from uniform, but the cumulative impact has been substantial. Brown has emerged as a social democrat, more modern and market-friendly than those of the postwar Labour governments, but recognisably part of the same tradition. As “Bagehot” in The Economist put it

This is now a confident party÷confident in its ability to win elections, confident that thanks to its record in government Labour has now conclusively won the case for tax and spend, and confident that Mr Brown’s ãLabour valuesä are shared by a majority of Britons. When Mr Blair tells his party that the 21st century will be as much a victory for progressive politics as the 20th was for the politics of conservatism, it doesn’t just want to believe him: it does.

This confidence has been a help to Mr Blair this week. But such self-satisfaction, bordering on complacency, is also dangerous to him. Mr Blair’s constant refrain about the need for further public-sector reform increasingly grates. ãReformä equals criticism, which plays into the hands of the Tories. As even Mr Brown finds it difficult to keep the public spending gusher flowing, the demands from the party for tax increases aimed at the relatively affluent will become more strident. What might have been regarded as electoral suicide a few years ago is now thought of as positively populist. In short, this is a party that thinks it has won the argument and is now bored with the stealthy egalitarianism that has served New Labour so well.

Meanwhile, despite Labour’s poor showing in the opinion polls, the Tories are looking into the abyss. They have gained little or nothing from Labour’s decline. Even a further loss of support for Blair would merely force Labour back to the option of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats who have been the big beneficiary of Labour’s woes.

The problems for the Tories stem from the Thatcher decade, when they ran an extreme government with the support of 40 per cent of voters thanks to a divided opposition. The bitterness against that government has never dissipated. Meanwhile, its long period in office created an illusion among hardcore Tories that they were a natural government. As Peter Hitchens says in The Spectator, a more realistic view is that

the Conservative partyâ … is now so decrepit and beaten that it is extremely unlikely ever to form a majority government again. I say extremely unlikely only out of superstition. Some wholly unpredictable political asteroid might so change the electoral countryside that such a thing happens. But it will have to be quite an asteroid.