After Blair

Max Hastings, gushing about Dave ‘Vote Blue get Green’ Cameron in the Guardian.

Whatever happens in the months ahead, the circumstances of Blair’s departure will be at best undignified, at worst humiliating. Whatever Gordon Brown does on inheriting the mantle, he will find himself in the position of an aged Broadway star summoned to London to revive the fortunes of a flagging musical – deprived even of its custard-pie turn with the announcement that John Prescott is “resting”, as he surely soon will be.

The highlights of Brown’s early premiership will be supervision of a more or less ignominious retreat from Iraq, further increases in taxation, pressures on public spending and – if Brown is foolish – a lurch back to “old Labour values”. Leave morality out of this. As Blair always understood and the left never does, there are not enough poor people in Britain to elect a government. The majority of “haves” will always care more about what happens to them than about compassion for the less fortunate…