For a Prime Minister who already dwarfs all other British politicians, last week was perhaps the apotheosis of Tony Blair.
The Labour Party conference, when managed with the presentational skills brought to politics by New Labour, provides a series of free hits for the party. But even in a good week, which last week certainly was for Labour, the party leader only gets to have one of those hits - the set piece "Leader"s Speech", the most anticipated and important speech of the political year.
Tony Blair has, however, spent his career changing such rules. This year, not only did he make his speech - one the most direct, uncompromising and challenging arguments his Labour Party audience has heard from him - he also, on Thursday, staged the latest in his new monthly press conferences. But on Monday, before either his speech or the press conference, he set the week up by publishing a pamphlet: "The courage of our convictions: Why reform of the public services is the route to social justice".
Its message is stark: critics of his public service reforms risk becoming "prisoners" of an outdated model of the welfare state. Far from reducing the role of the private sector, as the trade unions are demanding, he insists that the private finance initiative (PFI) must be expanded if schools, hospitals and other public services are to meet the standards expected by voters.
Interesting stuff. But what may come as a surprise is that the pamphlet, a no holds barred defence of the private sector"s involvement in public services, and a thinly veiled attack on the welfare state legacy of the 1945 Labour government, was published by the Fabian Society.
Ever since its foundation in 1884, the Fabian Society has been a by-word for traditional, top down, socialism - state planning, and the post-war state-run welfare state. Its key thinkers, such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and RH Tawney, were in many ways the intellectual architects of all previous Labour governments. More than that, the influence of the Fabian Society, and its thinking, extended across the planet.
Between 1992 and 1996 I was the Fabian Society"s Research Director. Barely a day went by without my experiencing an example of its global reach, whether it was receiving a caller from its Delhi branch, Chinese ministers visiting London to discuss Fabian socialism or, as once happened, my taking a phone call from Senator Daniel P Moynihan, wanting a copy of a 1975 Fabian pamphlet on urban enterprise zones.
The Fabians had been most influential in the first two thirds of the last century. The word "Fabian" derived from the Roman General, Quintus Fabius Maximus, who advocated the weakening the opposition by steady but sure harassing operations, rather than becoming involved in pitched battles. That slowly but surely approach, typified by discussion meetings and pamphlets, yielded great dividends. The Fabian Society was the inspiration behind the broadly left-of-centre consensual politics across most of the Western world.
The society"s methods and outlook were not, however, well suited to the disarray of the 1970s and the stark political conflicts of the 1980s. In truth, by the late 1980s it had become little more than a talking shop for a few old fashioned, out of power socialists. That Fabian Society of old would never have published a pamphlet such as Tony Blair"s, which demolishes many of the shibboleths of the state-run welfare state for which the Fabians were in large measure responsible.
The new approach of the Fabian Society today, however, is worth looking at, because it makes a broader point about the Labour Party itself and the direction to be taken by the government over the next decade.
When I joined the Fabians in 1992, Labour had just lost its fourth election in a row. But by electing John Smith, the ultimate safe pair of hands, as leader, the party signalled that it still did not realise the scale of its defeat. The ERM crisis that autumn and Black Wednesday surged Labour to double digit opinion poll leads. Smith"s tactics were simple: sleepwalk to victory at the next election. Say or do nothing of note, keep your head down, and by the time of the next election Labour would romp home on the back of the Conservatives" unpopularity.
We decided at the Fabians that our role should be to question that strategy, which we termed instead "sleepwalking to oblivion". We were, if you like, New Labour before the phrase was coined. We commissioned focus groups - unprecedented in the Labour Party; we argued that the party should embrace business and the market; and we pushed for Labour to ditch its commitment to nationalisation, sacred to most party members. The leadership wished only that we would shut up, as we made all sorts of waves unhelpful to its safety first approach. Only two senior politicians gave us support: Jack Straw, whose role in the Labour"s modernisation is often unfairly overlooked, and Tony Blair.
We had a cause - making Labour electable. Today, Labour is the ultimate election winning machine. And with that, the Fabians - the same applies to all Labour leaning think tanks - have, to adapt Dean Acheson"s famous phrase, lost a raison d"etre and failed to find a role. The Labour think tanks as a whole have struggled since the party was elected in 1997 to provide the government with the same cutting edge which the Conservative think tanks, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute, offered to Baroness Thatcher. One of Mr Blair"s closest advisors said to me recently that he has not seen a single useful publication from a think tank since he started working in Downing Street. Not one.
That is symptomatic of the nature of New Labour. The Conservatives had a battle to fight - restoring balance between the unions and business, reducing the ever increasing size of the public sector, and promoting economic liberty. That gave their think tanks a clear remit, and the scope to make headway with new ideas. Labour"s task, in contrast, is primarily managerial: reforming public services, keeping the economy ticking over, and getting away with as much redistribution of wealth as it can without upsetting the applecart. It is hardly inspirational, and it"s no wonder that the Labour think tanks, such as the Fabians, the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Social Market Foundation, have struggled to make an impact.
No think tank would turn down the publicity generated by publishing the Prime Minister. But the important question is this: have they got anything else to offer?

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