The Severed Alliance:Blair & Brown:The New Labour Revolution.

Don't they look young! Don't they look old! Blair & Brown:The New Labour Revolution (BBC2/iPlayer) jumps so far back that it's almost surprising to see Tony Blair (now 68 years old) and Gordon Brown (70) looking so fresh faced. But then it brings us bang up to the present day, and with Labour more than eleven years out of power, reminds us that time takes its toll on us all.

Perhaps one of the most impressive feats of the five part series is that both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown agreed to be interviewed for it. They're not the only 'big beasts' that the program's makers have roped in. Among the assorted research assistants, deputy ambassadors, speechwriters, chief whips, political strategists, and secretaries (oh, so many secretaries:- cabinet secretaries, permanent secretaries, press secretaries, political secretaries, diary secretaries, and principal private secretaries) we're treated to the opinions, and reminisces, of many of the stars of late 90s/2000s political life.

The good, the bad, and, naming no names, the ugly. Neil Kinnock, Alistair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, Ed Balls, Douglas Alexander, Charlie Whelan, David Blunkett, Alan Milburn, Jack Straw, Clare Short, Diane Abbott, Alistair Darling, and Patricia Hewitt. Plus players who may, quite easily, have slipped your mind. Anyone for Geoff Hoon, Andrew Adonis, or John Reid?

Some people are just easier to forget than others. You may have noticed that's a very Labour heavy list of talking heads and so it should be. Labour were the dominant force throughout the Blair and Brown years but there is some balance provided by George Osborne and former Conservative leaders Michael Howard and William Hague. Hague, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight and having learned a lesson in humility, is surprisingly reflective and insightful about the era.

And what an era it was! 9/11, the financial crisis, floods, foot and mouth outbreaks, the Millennium Dome and its various attendant controversies, the death of Diana, George W Bush ascending to the US presidency (and us all thinking he'd be the worst president ever, compared to Trump he sounds like Stephen Fry), the Good Friday Agreement, tobacco advertising in Formula One, the death of Dr David Kelly, and even one millennium ending and another beginning.

The story goes further back to cover the miner's strike, the election of Bill Clinton, and Jacques Santer urging Britain to join the Euro. Blair thought it was a good idea and wanted in. Brown did not. Which is a sign of the rift that the program makers clearly hope to exploit to tell the story of a power struggle between the two men.

Which they do, quite well. But, as much as that, it's the story of the rise and, eventual, fall of New Labour and has some small moments that take us right back to the era. Peter Mandelson's 'tache, a very young Ed Miliband, Campbell saying that when Blair and Brown were on song the battle between Labour and the Tories was like Barcelona v Hartlepool, Mandelson (again) crying on television, and Blair attempting to win over middle England in various different ways.

See the great centrist in stone wash jeans, see him reading The Daily Mail (of all papers) on a platform at Kings Cross station, and see him being slow handclapped at a Wembley Arena full of Women's Institute Members. Go back even further to see him grinning on Question Time in the early eighties at a time when Labour were associated with the 'loony left' and cast the net even wider to take in Ceefax, D:Ream, some quality John Pienaar, and some classic era Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys (two men, it seems, who were never young).

There's even consideration of the once heated debate as to whether or not the N in New Labour should be capitalised or not. But the story begins with the 1983 election and Margaret Thatcher's landslide victory over Michael Foot. Even Tony Benn lost his seat. I remember it well. It was the time I vowed never to vote Conservative in my life.

I was fifteen and I have not only honoured that vow but have become ever more determined to stick by it - not least under the kakistocracy of Boris Johnson. In 1983, in striking parallels to the 2019 election, Labour were seen by many on the doorstep as a complete joke - and a completely unelectable joke.

Two new Labour politicians did become MPs after that election though. Tony Blair won easily in the safe Labour seat (at least until 2019) of Sedgefield and Gordon Brown in Dunfermline East. They ended up sharing an office together and despite, or perhaps because, Blair was about 'style' and Brown was about 'substance' they became firm friends.

They'd had very different backgrounds and the show takes us back to see them. Brown's religious upbringing in Kirkcaldy and university years in Edinburgh contrast strongly with Blair's more relaxed, eager, clubbable, less serious if you like, approach to life. Blair, at university in Oxford, had no interest whatsoever in going into politics and, instead, was trying out the lifestyle of a long haired rule breaker.

Most famously with his band Ugly Rumours. After uni, Blair became a lawyer and Brown went straight into politics. The program doesn't linger at all on Blair's time as a lawyer or Brown's very early political career and instead jumps forward to the 1987 election and another GE defeat for Labour under Kinnock, to Thatcher.

Although, in a way that sounds familiar, some Labour supporters claimed they'd 'won' the argument! Hmm. When, in '89, Kinnock puts together a shadow cabinet both Blair and Brown find themselves in it. Brown as deputy to shadow chancellor John Smith. Another who starts getting more involved, heavily involved, is Mandelson who, elevating himself perhaps due to a feeling that his role in New Labour has been undervalued or unfairly maligned, describes himself, Blair, and Brown as a "trio of musketeers".

Possibly the least imaginative name you could give to a group of three people. What does work though is Blair's way of delivering speeches in the way Brown tells him to. It's undeniably powerful but it's not enough to stop another GE loss for Kinnock in 1992, this time to John Major.

Labour had had a five point lead at one point going into the election. It looked Kinnock would win but .... he didn't. As I recall it he fell over walking on a beach, ended up on the credits of Spitting Image being lampooned, and was abused as a 'Welsh windbag' by a lot of the Tory press. So we got another lustrum of Tory rule.

Kinnock's work (much of it very good work) was done and John Smith took over as leader of the Labour party. Blair wondered why Brown didn't put himself forward for the job and he started wondering if Brown didn't want it badly enough or was, and this would come back to haunt Brown, indecisive.

Others, like the Sunday Times, wondered, and wondered loudly and publicly, if Blair may not have been a better choice of leader. Both Brown and Blair got plum positions in Smith's shadow cabinet (Blair as shadow home secretary and Brown as shadow chancellor). Blair, inspired by the US election win of Bill Clinton - a leftist who could 'do' economy, felt an urgent need for the party to change, to modernise, but Smith felt patience was the answer.

Smith thought, wrongly and sadly, that he had time to make those changes. When Smith died, aged just 55, in May 1994 it triggered another leadership race within the Labour party and, initially, Gordon Brown felt his two most likely rivals for the job would be John Prescott and Robin Cook. Cook didn't stand but Blair did and Brown felt it was his duty to the party to stand aside and support his friend.

Blair, of course - and not for the last time, won easily (polling 57% to Prescott's 24.1& and acting leader Margaret Beckett's 18.9%). Blair became Labour's youngest ever leader and, with Alistair Campbell soon on board, the party is rebranded, almost accidentally, as New Labour. Capital N or not.

As Major's government grew increasingly unpopular, the option of Blair and New Labour began to appeal to more and more and in 1997 he finally beat John Major in a General Election, a swing of an enormous 20% saw Blair's Labour take 418 seats to Major's Tory party's 165. 

I'd not long moved to London and began working in a very minor role in the music industry. I wasn't yet thirty. Life seemed to be opening up before me. Euro 96 had given the nation a feelgood factor the year before but this was something else. The end of the cruel and amoral Tory party who had been in power since I was at junior school.

Positive change felt possible both in my life and in the life of the nation (I'm quite convinced those two things are often more inextricably linked than we give credit to). The pound soon hit a record high, Brown hit the 'fat cats', museums became free to enter, peace in Northern Ireland looked possible (this program is particularly interesting when it touches on the Good Friday Agreement), we had devolution in both Scotland and Wales, human rights legislation was passed, and a Freedom of Information Act came into law. If Blair hobnobbing with Oasis and Kevin Keegan looks cringeworthy in retrospect, at the time it was a sign that people around the country genuinely trusted in the man.

The feelgood factor was to last for a few years but, within the party, it wasn't long before, as ever with Labour, infighting came in. First in the form of a proxy war between Charlie Whelan (Brownite) and Alistair Campbell (Blairite). That led to entire government departments becoming split by those loyal to either man.

Blair wanted to rule out, forever, a rise on the top rate of tax. Brown did not. Blair brought Tory voters inside but Brown get the Labour loyalists happy (although Prescott also came in handy there) but the partnership worked far better when it worked smoothly and with trust than it did when there was enmity between those involved.

As the 2001 GE loomed, the polls were all over the place. Some had Labour in a 22 point lead, others had the Tories (now under Hague) eight points ahead. In the end it was another landslide for Labour with Blair taking 412 seats to Hague's 166. It was first time a Labour leader had been returned to power since the days of Harold Wilson.

Blair briefly considered demoting Brown by moving him to the Foreign Office and that might be a decision he came to regret as soon the relationship deteriorated further. From a kind of constructive disagreement to a destructive one. In the words of John Reid:- "the prince couldn't wait for the king to die".

Suggesting a Shakespearean drama of ambition and, of course, tragedy. The greatest tragedy of the entire Blair premiership however was one he will probably never be forgiven for and one he never should be forgiven for. The war, first, in Afghanistan and then, even more so, the war in Iraq.

I remember at the time that I supported the removal of the brutal murderous dictator Saddam Hussein but I still attended an anti-war march - of over two million people - in London. I was conflicted and it was a conflicting time. Both action and inaction would leave blood on the hands of those who supported it. In retrospect, the war in Iraq only made life worse for Iraqis and cost tens of thousands, if not millions, of people their lives.

The Afghanistan war took a lot longer to be proven another disastrous colonial enterprise. It was only earlier this year that the Taliban returned to power and we saw those horrific scenes of people trying to escape Kabul by plane. At the time, at the beginning at least, it seemed a successful operation. The Taliban were overthrown and within a week, al-Qaeda (whom the Taliban were allowing to carry out their 'work' from Afghanistan) were in hiding within a week.

The weapons of mass destruction (WMD) document that was used as justification for the invasion of Iraq said that Hussein had got his hands on chemical and nuclear weapons. It was, as we all know now, 'sexed up'. The Sun even suggested that it was only forty-five minutes before Brits in Cyprus were annihilated by Iraq.

When the UN inspectors, most notably Hans Blix, went in to Iraq they found nothing. Which seemed to only suggest to Blair and others who waged war that Hussein was hiding them very well. So the war happened, Saddam fell and was eventually executed by hanging in Baghdad. Nobody felt sorry for him but after Saddam what became of Iraq?

A mess. Despite, or perhaps because of, this when the 2005 election came along Blair was returned for a third time (this time with a smaller, but still significant majority) after beating Michael Howard's Tory party. By this point it seems Blair was regretting that he'd told people he didn't intend to see out a third term. The eager, grinning, wannabe rockstar with no real interest in politics had, finally, become a political animal and one with a clear agenda.

An agenda many in the Labour party, and many of its supporters, were now either tired of or vehemently against. Brown, too, was not happy. He wanted Blair to get on with standing down. The two of them argued - loudly. Other Labour MPs urged Blair to stand down and when juniors in the party started resigning ('suicide bombers' one observer calls them) it became obvious to Blair that to not stand down would damage the party.

So he did and Gordon Brown took over. Only one man stood against him - John McDonnell - and Brown won over 88% of the vote. A figure he'd have enjoyed. As he would the eleven point poll lead he soon surged to ahead of the Tories but that didn't last long. Many pleaded with him to call a snap election and even though the man himself still says it would have been a mistake it's hard to believe he really thinks that when he wakes up in the middle of the night.

David Cameron and George Osborne, the opposition leader and shadow chancellor, sensed blood. They fancied their chances against Brown far more than they did against Blair who Osborne refers to as a "Tory destroying machine". As the country starts to see Brown as a bottler, make jokes him about him having only one good eye, insult his Scottishness, and blame him for a financial crisis that was not his fault (he actually handled it really well), it seems inevitable that his days are numbered.

And soon they were. In 2010 David Cameron brings the Tories back into power for the first time since 1997 and sets in train a series of events that will lead to the disastrous leadership of Theresa May and the cruel, amoral, and venal government of huckster, liar, bully, and criminal Boris Johnson. 

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had their faults, in Blair's case the war in Iraq is particularly egregious, but to have people of their capabilities and moral courage in power again now would have served this country much better through the pandemic, we'd not be suffering a calamitous Brexit, and we wouldn't believe that as a nation we deserve no better than Boris Johnson and the ABCD him and the Tories have given us and their party still thrives on:- austerity, Brexit, Covid deaths over 140,000, and, most deadly of all in the long term, division.

Blair & Brown:The New Labour Revolution did a good, if possibly partial, job of telling a story of a time when politicians in the UK incorporated style into their delivery as much as substance - though that possibly began when Thatcher took elocution lessons - as much as it told a story of two men drawn to each other and then pulled apart by circumstance and ambition. When they make the story of the Johnson years, the characters will be equally big but they will be less capable. They will have far less style and, far more importantly - and lethally for many of us, they will have no substance whatsoever.