The choice was not just between two different branches of a family tree – it was between two differing political ideologies. Or at least that’s the way it was being presented. Older brother David was the anointed successor to Tony Blair, and he was firmly entrenched in the “New Labour” makeover created by Blair and Gordon Brown in the 1990’s. That movement pulled the Labour party to the right to make it palatable to middle England and therefore electable. It came shortly after Bill Clinton remade the Democrats in the same way in the United States, though the term “New Democrat” has become almost an irrelevancy as the Democrats have settled comfortably into their new centrist role. That was never the case in the UK, where a large part of the Labour party resented Blair and Brown for pulling the party to the right and longed for a leader to end the New Labour project and return the party to its socialist routes.
