My column considers the plight of the post-Blair Tories a decade ago with the post-Obama Republicans:
It’s 1997. Maybe you remember the feeling. A new premier of the left: charismatic, careful to appeal to the political centre, replacing a deeply tainted, long-endured conservative brand, all with a sprinkle of fairy dust to keep the scepticism at bay. One of his core missions is keeping the right off balance by appropriating its language and, in some cases, policies, while relentlessly draining the atmosphere of polarising rhetoric.
Barack Obama is more ambitious much more ambitious than Tony Blair, but he has absorbed his lessons. He is removing ideology from the discourse, gradually whittling away at the left-right divide by claiming pragmatism and seizing the public mood. And the most threatened and flummoxed of entities in America today, as in Britain a decade ago, is the political right. The Republicans in 2009 feel increasingly like the Tories of 1997: beleaguered, desperate and flailing for ways to appeal to the middle.
Last Tuesday was not a good omen.
The rest here. Yes, the spelling is English. And you wonder why I can't spell advertising.