ABSTRACT
Whenever Tony Blair talks about previous Labour administrations, he invariably refers to the Attlee Government of 1945-51, and almost never to the Wilson and Callaghan Governments of 1974-9. This is deliberate. For the Blairites, the Labour Governments of the second half of the 1960s and 1970s were failures, not least because they did not succeed in being re-elected for two full terms. The Attlee Government is now so far in the past – beyond the memories of most voters – that it can safely be praised without risk, as the creator of the National Health Service and ‘coming closest to building a new Jerusalem’.1
