Some time in 1996, when I was working in a Westminster think tank, proselytising for the New Labour message, a colleague asked me why, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I maintained that a New Labour government would be reforming and radical. Didn’t I realise that there was a vacuum at the heart of New Labour? ‘No, no’, I replied. The party couldn’t run the risk of alienating potential supporters by making clear how extensive its reforms would be, but I knew that there would be big, bold changes.

I used the now clichéd argument: just as only Nixon could go to China, so only Labour could really get to grips with the anachronism that was the NHS and the own goal of the welfare state.

‘Yeah, right’, my colleague responded witheringly. ‘You think there’s a safe in Blair’s office with a big sign – IDEAS: NOT TO BE OPENED BEFORE THE NEXT ELECTION.’

As I sat by the TV screen in 2001 watching the election results come in, I thought of that conversation. And I did so again in 2005, as 8 years of New Labour government came and went offering little more than the usual Labour recipe of a massive spending increase and tax rises to pay for it, plus – this was what was new – a modicum of competence.

The convenient explanation for the failure of the Blair governments to effect anything but relatively minor administrative changes to the NHS, welfare and education is that the ideas were indeed locked in the safe. But the code was lost.

The reality, however, appears to be worse. To mix up the metaphors: only Nixon could go to China, but he had first to want to go. Whatever Mr Blair’s words might suggest, his actions show that he had no real desire to be the bold, reforming PM some of us hoped he would be.

With the Labour Party in disarray now, it’s difficult to remember just how fair was the wind behind the government in 1997. Had Mr Blair chosen to start with a bang, he could have done. Had he announced that he would build a health service for the twenty-first century rather than stick with a model devised for the 1950s, he would have had problems with his more antediluvian backbenchers, but the landslide which propelled him into Number Ten would have given him more than enough support. Similarly with welfare.

Instead, he chose to appoint Frank Dobson as Health Secretary and to slam shut the door on reform. Even the appointment of Alan Milburn to the job was more about style than substance. For all that Mr Milburn cam to realise the need for genuine, wholesale reform based on choice and competition, when he took over as Secretary of State he initially remained stuck in the old mindset that the answer was more money.

No one could blame him, for he took his lead from a Prime Minister who on healthcare was – and still is – barely less ideologically attached to the NHS model than the oldest of old Labourites. His NHS policy amounted to spending as much money as it was possible to wrest from taxpayers and then fiddling with the administrative structure to spend it a bit more efficiently.

Even that limited goal was a failure. By the end of this decade the NHS will consume 10 per cent of UK GDP - over £4,500 per household, a sum which international comparisons show is more than sufficient to deliver high quality and immediate access. But as Nick Bosanquet has shown in his series of papers for Reform: “The sheer size of the spending increase has made it impossible to use the funding effectively and swamped the management capacity of a system which had become adapted to working on much smaller increments. These productivity problems have been well discussed and a fair summary would be that while real terms funding has doubled, activity, quality and access have risen by only 20-30 per cent.” (http://www.reform.co.uk/website/health.aspx) Much of the money has effectively been thrown down the drain.

Instead of building for the future, with a health system taking account of modern needs and the opportunities presented by increased individual wealth, the Blair governments have spent ten years fiddling about with gimmicks.

As for education, another wasted opportunity: the apotheosis of that failure was reached at the beginning of March when the school system which many parents have, colloquially, referred to as a lottery formally became one, as Brighton opted to allocate school places by ballot. Can there be a more damning indictment of the past ten wasted years? It is certainly right that all parents and children are given the same opportunity. But the idea that a government which once claimed – oh, the hubris of it! - to be the political arm of the British people should achieve that end not by giving all parents the same choice of school, through a form of voucher, but by putting school applications into a ballot is mind-numbing in its defeatism.

Still, with hindsight it should always have been obvious that this was a government concerned more with the occupation of office than with actually doing anything worthwhile. When, as a policy wonk in opposition prior to 1997, I suggested various ideas, the response was almost always the same: ‘That’s second term stuff’. So I bided my time and waited for the reforming second term, a la Thatcher. And the response became: ‘That’s for the third term’. I haven’t heard ‘that’s fourth term stuff’, because I gave up asking.

And because the fourth term, if it happens, will be Gordon’s Brown term. And Mr Brown is the element in this which cannot be ignored. It’s striking that the one area in which Mr Blair has been bold and brave has been in his stance in the fight to defend the West against militant Islam, and in his support for the removal of dictatorships and butchers. And that is the one area in which he has not had to take account of the big clunking fist in the house next door.