Every new government promises to represent a new dawn, but for New Labour it was the Covenant that Tony Blair made with Britain. The party that won a landslide victory on May Day 1997 made the special claim that it represented a decisive break with the disappointments of the old left and the old right: its Third Way would transcend both. Having fashioned an extraordinarily wide coalition to secure power, New Labour would hold it as Servants of the People. 

          Was that a grandiloquent way of saying the governemnt would be enslaved to the opinion polls? Or has Tony Blair been pursuing a strategic plan, breathtaking in its audacity, to remake the political landscape of Britain in the third millennium?