A Big Idea to Suit the Nation's Grumpy Mood

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Tony Blair is finding his true voice. Catapulted unexpectedly into the Labour leadership and learning on the job, he has spent many months publicly refining his message, sharpening his ideas, searching for words that will really hit home. Now, far from home, in Japan and Singapore, he has started to come up with the language for his election campaign.

Politics is about philosophy and the big picture, as well as detailed policy and crisis management. If voters have no sense of where a government is headed, or how it thinks about the world, then their interest in its legislation will be pretty limited. In Labour's case, it has had a huge historical weight to …