An old university chum, now transplanted to the Bay Area, kindly - if that's the right word - alerts me to a piece I wrote in autumn 1995 for our college magazine TCD Miscellany (a publication with a distinguished past but, in our day at least, an erratic publishing schedule) about Blair's new Labour party and the challenge facing John Major. Today, of course, the parties have swapped places and it's David Cameron who poses a severe challenge to a Labour party grown fat and cynical on power. So, just swap the parties and this could almost be true of Britain today, as the country looks towards the next election:
"Most commentators have already written the Tories off, feeling that a party so bereft of policy initiatives, riven by faction, discord, sleaze and scandal cannot possibly retain the affections of the electorate. On the face of it this is true: [John] Major will require an unprecedented recovery in the polls even to come close to Tony Blair's all-smiling, all-dancing, all-things-to-all-men toy Labour Party."
It's depressing, mind you, to be reminded that apparently I was writing, in that same issue, about the slippery slope potential of smoking bans fully 12 years ago. Not so much prescience, I'm afraid, as a youthful appreciation that a resigned groan of O Tempora, O Mores summed up the way of the world...
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