ABSTRACT
Prior to Labour’s election victory in 1997, the attempt to distance the Party from its supposedly strife-torn past was at the heart of its leader’s modernising project. For some time Labour had tried to persuade voters to forget about its historical experience in office, to say nothing of the near suicidal internal conflict that engulfed the Party on its return to opposition after 1979. This had not, however, proved successful: the chaotic images of the Winter of Discontent regularly conjured up by the Conservatives were just too powerful, too entrenched. Instead, a new, rather audacious strategy was tried: rather than playing down its past difficulties, the Party would own up to them – and in spades. The encouragement of amnesia was replaced by the penitent’s promise to have changed for the better, and for good. Almost as soon as Tony Blair became leader, he and his lieutenants more or less consciously began to ‘paint a portrait of their own Party[’s past] in which accuracy was sacrificed not to enhance but to belittle the original’ in the hope that ‘to engage in pre-emptive auto-strikes, acknowledging the truth of much of the tabloid version [of that past] and then demonstrating that “New Labour” had learnt its lessons and wiped the slate clean’ would boost both the electoral chances of the Party and what they hoped was their ever-tightening grip upon it.1
