"It’s easy to forget now, but the highest law during the New Labour years, particularly for its staunchest advocates, generally revolved around status and personal advantage. This was politics, at its worst, at the end of history.

Philip Gould, New Labour’s polling supremo, wrote that the aspirations of the post-industrial working class had significantly shifted, now revolving around things like buying a new washing machine. Ideals and utopias were a thing of the past, he contended, replaced by consumerism, Pareto optimality and public management speak. But discarded alongside the ideological refuse of the Twentieth Century — by many of Gould’s fellow travellers at least — was any belief in an ethical life. For the faction’s most senior figures that intensified into a veneration of power for its own sake. It’s no accident that Jonathan Powell, formerly Blair’s chief of staff, and now Starmer’s national security adviser, wrote a book titled The New Machiavelli.

Rather than politics being an instrument to achieve a particular good, such as social democracy, national renewal or a flourishing free market, it became an end in itself. That would, in time, give rise to some of the ugliest pathologies in public life: if politics was about technique, and not morality, then how one behaved didn’t matter — and one certainly shouldn’t be concerned about the consequences. Understand this and suddenly the actions of not only Mandelson, but Blair and Alastair Campbell, become easier to comprehend. An obsession with making money, a vice typically ascribed to the Conservatives, is far more intuitive to the common man."

https://unherd.com/2026/02/the-dark-shadow-of-the-blairites/

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