Bill Clinton and Tony Blair held seminars on the ‘third way’ – Boris Johnson is their disciple

The prime minister is trying to steal Labour’s best tunes, according to John Rentoul

Bill and Hillary Clinton met the Queen on a visit to the UK (AFP/Getty)

Today’s A-level politics students devote a surprising amount of time to the ideas of Anthony Giddens, the Labour peer who wrote a book called The Third Way in 1998. I spoke to a class recently and was asked what role there was today for Giddens – “one of the key thinkers on our core political ideas unit”.  

Giddens’s book was said at the time to provide the ideological underpinning of the New Labour government, although Tony Blair tended to use the phrase, and the idea, more crudely, to mean neither the new right of Thatcherism nor the old left of Labour’s past.  

He invited Giddens to seminars at Chequers, the prime minister’s country house, with Bill Clinton and an array of thinkers and politicians, in 1997. President Clinton returned the invitation the following year, with a session at the White House, when the Monica Lewinsky crisis was at its height. The president kept falling asleep until he drank six large mugs of black coffee, at which point he started to expound brilliantly on policy detail.