Timid Mr Blair should heed the voters' message

Readers of this column know that I am not a Ken man. Even so, this week's tabloid attacks on the new mayor (and here I admit to taking a calculated gamble, since I am writing some six hours before polls even close) has made me want to hug him to my manly bosom and take care of him. Given a choice between left opportunism and right opportunism, I go left every time. At least Ken doesn't want anyone deported. Except penniless tourists, of course.

Still, even as he is fêted and congratulated, I bet he feels that it has been a difficult last few days. He only just got out from under the May Day violence by the skin of his teeth, belatedly discovering that he wasn't quite so blasé about Seattle-style store-trashing coming to London as he had originally thought. But hold on, if capitalism is yet another thing on a par with the Holocaust (like English actions in Ireland, to mention another Ken Holocaust parallel), why would he not encourage the youth of Eton and Leamington Spa to gun down bankers in the street?

But never mind that, because I think Ken may have learned part of his lesson. People voted for him because they liked him personally, they thought Fares Fair was a good policy, and - above all - they loathed the way that the Labour Party violated its own high-falutin principles about one-person one-vote to try and stop him running. They didn't (I believe) vote for Ken because they thought Gerry Adams was a better guy than David Trimble. They didn't vote for Ken because they realised that bonds were a superior way of getting private finance into the Tube than the Government's PPP. They didn't vote for Ken because they wanted to see capitalism replaced as a world system with whatever weird concoction Ken's eccentric economic advisors could dream up instead.

No. Ken has a mandate, mostly, to walk around being Kenlike. That is, to try and really be what most people already believe he is - open, attractive, candid and clear. Londoners like his tolerance and what they perceive as his inclusiveness. His willingness to talk to all and any party about posts and roles in his mayoral government has smacked of the new politics that we were once promised. Many London people that I know felt that it was liberating to be able to split their ballots yesterday, and vote for up to four different parties, including the Kennists. Very few of us, these days, wish to mortgage ourselves to one party in perpetuity.

Which brings us to this week's great losers - ironically the creators of the mayorship (which Ken originally opposed) and of the new voting system - the Labour Party. This morning Tony Blair will not lack for unsought advice. Some will suggest (including a few emboldened colleagues) that this is the death-knell for New Labour, and that what is required is a return to heartlands and ancient verities. These troglodytes will look at the London, Romsey and local election results, and draw exactly the wrong conclusions.

Let me get in first. Blair should start by admitting, as he did over Wales, that Labour messed things up in London. But that can only be the start. He has to tell us why they messed things up. Why did no senior Labour figure want to stand for the position until Ken had already built an almost unassailable lead? Was it because insufficient power had been invested in the job? Was it also because they lacked conviction about the new structures that they were themselves bringing into the world? Why did they not put their early weight behind a non-conventional candidate, like Trevor Phillips, and then allow the political argument to be had within the London Labour Party? And why were they so terrified of a Livingstone Labour candidacy that they were prepared to break a specific promise about the method of election, and sever the trust between themselves and the public?

There are two common threads, I believe, running through almost all of the Government's failures to date. The first has been an unwillingness, at critical moments, actually to be New Labour. In the party itself, the old habits of political distrust and sectarianism have refused to die. Mr Blair is said now to bitterly regret not including Paddy Ashdown in his first cabinet. He's right. He dithered and deferred to the Kilfoyles and Fraser Kemps, the machine men, the opponents of electoral reform and realignment.

Theirs was also the psychology of the London stitch-up, the card-vote and the heckling of Charles Kennedy at Prime Minister's Question Time, and their era has gone. How ironic that Ken Livingstone, who argued vociferously against any rapprochement with the Lib Dems when he was in the Labour Party, should be so willing to encompass one now he is out!

New Labour should have been the party of unqualified freedom of information. It should have been the party that embraced "gaffes" as a necessary consequence of openness. It should - as Don Macintyre said on this page yesterday - have told the unvarnished truth about its spending plans, its achievements and its failures, the better to be believed when there was (as there has been) good news to tell. Its most paraded figures should have included Clare Short, who has done a spectacular job at Overseas Development and who has been willing to discuss the decriminalisation of cannabis.

And here we can see the line of the second thread of failure. We are enduring, at the moment, a period when the political agenda has been seized by the inky Haiderists of The Sun and the curtain-twitching Stahlhelm of the Daily Mail. Had Labour been brave enough to challenge this agenda from the outset, rather than seeking to mollify those who constructed it, then Mr Blair's friends would have been strengthened and his enemies would have been no better off. Listening to Labour ministers competing for air-space with the Tories on asylum-seeking and begging (all the while making it almost impossible to argue that the BBC, say, might like to think for itself on this subject), has been the single most depressing phenomenon of the last three years.

Fear of tabloid editors has made Labour timid on the euro, wrong on asylum-seeking (God, we warned them!), evasive on taxation, blinkered on drugs and contributed to the exceptional terror of being associated in any way with a Livingstone mayorship. And it's all been so unnecessary, because the bluff has been there to be called. If voters thought that the Government was gaining solid successes in improving public services and handling the economy, if they felt that poverty was genuinely being addressed, if they believed the Government was sincere in its argument that a civilised society has to treat would-be migrants properly, then they would hardly be likely to throw all of that up because of their own prejudices on asylum-seekers.

The Mail and The Sun do not speak for Middle Britain. There is a new and growing constituency in this country that is well educated and reasonably tolerant. It is, above all, practical. Labour's lesson from London should be to engage with this new Britain, fearlessly. We still need the new politics.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com