Servants of the People

Resumen del libro

Every new government promises to represent a new dawn, but for New Labour it was the Covenant that Tony Blair made with Britain. The party that won a landslide victory on May Day 1997 made the special claim that it represented a decisive break with the disappointments of the old left and the old right: its Third Way would transcend both. Having fashioned an extraordinarily wide coalition to secure power, New Labour would hold it as Servants of the People.

Was that a grandiloquent way of saying the government would be enslaved to the opinion polls? Or has Tony Blair been pursuing a strategic plan, breathtaking in its audacity, to remake the political landscape of Britain into the third millennium?

Andrew Rawnsley, the award-winning political commentator and broadcaster, measures the successes and failures of the least experienced cabinet to take office in more than a century, as it battles to master the challenges of government. He teases out the contradictions and explores the conflicts within the New Labour project. With vividly drawn portraits of the key players and accounts of the turbulent relationships between them, he takes us through the decisive episodes in the government's development to reveal the ambitions, fears and motives of New Labour from the inside.