No, Tony Blair is not coming back to save Labour – but his win 20 years ago still matters

Theresa May has learned the lessons of Labour’s greatest ever election win, but Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters have not

1 May marks the anniversary of New Labour's landslide victory in the 1997 election

It was a good idea for the Government to mark Tony Blair Day with a bank holiday, to give people time to reflect on the importance of Labour’s historic victory on 1 May 1997. Some people have taken their civic responsibilities seriously, using it as an occasion to remember how Blair won and how he was able to use that mandate to change the country. Unfortunately, most of those people, Theresa May chief among them, are in the Conservative Party, while the majority of Labour Party members seem to have turned their backs on history.

The Prime Minister has pitched her big tent right across the political field. I cringe when she uses the phrase “ordinary working people” – the word “ordinary” feels patronising – but working people themselves seem to think she is one of them. I cringed when Blair said in 1997: “I am a modern man, from the rock’n’roll generation.” I winced when he described New Labour as “the political arm of no one other than the British people”, but that is the role that May is now trying to claim for the post-Brexit Tory party.

Like Blair, she embodies the unifying message. How media sophisticates laughed when she looked awkward in a steward’s tabard, marshalling a fun run in her Maidenhead constituency. The vast majority of the mainly middle-aged and older electorate who saw the picture would have thought she was reassuringly normal – even “ordinary”.

She’s too controlled, journalists complain. That’s our job. We want a bit of unpredictable mayhem when politicians mingle with members of the public, like when John Prescott punched someone who egged him. Her job is to minimise political risk. No TV debates, stonewalling in TV interviews, limited contact with “ordinary” people. Just like Blair in 1997. Then, the centralised, disciplined Labour presentation led to wild stories about Blair being prompted in interviews via an earpiece (which politicians sometimes need to hear questions from a remote presenter).

But the important lesson from the past is to have a simple, unifying message presented by a popular leader who embodies it. Then it was modernisation, economic competence and social justice and the middle classes flocked to it. Now it is making the best of Brexit, economic competence and social justice and the working classes are flocking to it, some of them having stopped over with Ukip on the way but many of them coming straight across to the Tories.

Never mind that the Brexit talks might go horribly wrong. The leaks from the EU side of last Wednesday’s dinner may have been a pre-negotiation haka, but the chance of failure and an acrimonious exit are high, which is one of the reasons May went for an early election. Never mind, either, that May seemed strangely oblivious, in her interviews yesterday, to the Treasury’s plans, inherited from her hated enemy George Osborne, to cut tax credits for the working poor. The opinion polls suggest that the British people see her as a reassuring and strong leader – an image infinitely flattered by their low opinion of the alternative.

You cannot blame Blair for taking advantage of media interest in the 20th anniversary of his winning a majority of 179 – a demanding target for May to beat – by repeating his argument for keeping options open on Brexit. He speaks with the furious conviction of someone who led the country for 10 years, which reinforced his belief that our national interest lies in being in the EU. But that is actually an argument for another time, for when Brexit does go wrong, if it does, which the British people may not believe for many years, if ever.

The importance of today’s anniversary is in how to win elections and why it matters. When Jeremy Corbyn fails on 8 June, the party needs to realise that it needs wide appeal. The centre ground is a muddy and slippery concept, but a broad coalition of electoral interests is a simple and irresistible idea. Easy to say, and easy to see when Labour is doing it wrongly, of course, but hard to achieve.

The achievements of the government that took power 20 years ago ought to remind Labour people why it is worth it: Northern Ireland, minimum wage, trade union recognition, better schools, expanding universities and getting close to the abolition of waiting lists in the NHS. People have forgotten how run-down the public realm was in the late 1990s. The Labour Party, as it prepares for 9 June, needs to remember.