'Blairite' is a lazy term signifying only personal relationships, but the canon of 'Blairism' can be found and understood in A Journey. Paul Richards reads the memoir and urges the new leader to read it all and draw lessons on modernisation for Labour.

It is depressing but true that for all the hustings, speeches, manifestos, endorsements, mailings and phone calls, the Labour leadership contest has been less interesting to the public than a woman putting a cat into a wheelie bin.

It's been a tough summer for the Labour leadership contenders. But the race hasn't allowed for much real discussion on why Labour lost. The really big task is still to kick in; here are some thoughts on how to lead for Labour and Britain

There's a letter in the Times this morning jointly signed by various ex-coroners and medical folk calling for a new inquiry into the death of David Kelly. Should the home and justice secretaries agree to their demands?

Absorbing this latest news, Paul Richards says we need more - not less - reform on the lines of the smoking ban to win proper health equality in the UK, and that the Tories will succumb to the food industry push for the status quo

George Orwell never forgot the original Animal Farm in Sussex, but in England we are in danger of losing sight of our own radical landmarks. This is important, as which past we remember governs which future we will live.

The National Health Service (NHS) was famously the product of a political row. There was not only the titanic struggle with the British Medical Association (BMA), some of whose members called it ‘fascist', and the Conservative Party, which voted against it in Parliament.

The 'democracy village' on Parliament Square is undemocratic, stifles the freedoms of Londoners and visitors, and does not even win Brian Haw's approval

To borrow a phrase, Labour needs to understand why people want a conservatory: aspiration, the Miliband backstory and serious thought and on-the-ground organisation are key to this

Labour must soon decide what kind of opposition it wants to be. Partly because the country needs a decent opposition, and the taxpayer pays for one. But mostly because we're probably going to be doing it for a long time

Lib Dem ministers are vulnerable to splits and attrition over time, while Labour, now the only centre-left party, will show unity and win back Lib Dem switchers

Labour needs to keep candidates in place, relearn old parliamentary tricks and remember that the Tories have not done at all well

Policies, leaders, manifestos and ministers come and go, but the Labour Party is bigger than all of us, writes Paul Richards.

Cameron's arrogant two-fingered salute to the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s shows poor judgement compared to Brown's lifelong progressive values.

Has there ever been an election with an outcome so difficult to predict?

If we mutualise British Waterways, why not the rail, post office, land? Meaty opportunities for the manifesto are opening up

Short of a miracle resulting from last-minute talks, tomorrow will see the start of a three-day strike, with more dates planned, by British Airways cabin crew. This has become a political issue as well as an industrial dispute. How Labour reacts to the strike will have an impact on the general election.

In a week when David Cameron claimed that the Conservative Party won the Cold War, you might have missed another, equally big, bold and ahistorical assertion from a leading Conservative.

Thousands of words have been written about Michael Foot this week. One of the most important legacies of his life are the words he wrote.

The last time I saw Michael Foot was in New Palace Yard a few months ago. He looked ancient, like a battered first edition of a leather-bound book. He was being wheeled around parliament in a wheelchair by some friends. As he was born the year before the German army invaded Belgium, and first stood for parliament in 1935, it is not unrealistic to suggest that he is in the twilight of his life.

The Conservatives are assembling this weekend in Brighton for their pre-election rally. I can tell you now what's going to happen, and save you the job of having to watch it.

I may be the last person on earth (or at least in politics) to read them, but I am midway through the new paperback edition of Chris Mullin's diaries. They are a superbly-crafted record of Mullin's time as a reluctant, frustrated Labour minister under Tony Blair. They tell the Pooterish tale of Mullin's battles over his ministerial car (he didn't want one but was told he had to), his resistance to taking red boxes over the weekend, and his mammoth struggles within Whitehall to outlaw Leylandii, the fast-growing hedge, a struggle which Mullin identified early on as the one thing he wanted to achieve in his time in office. There are 13 references to Leylandii in the index. Don't spoil it for me - I haven't got to the bit yet which says whether or not he was successful.

For Labour, life after May seems almost impossible to imagine. It reminds me of an episode of the Goodies when they knew the world was coming to an end because after the last day, the pages of the Radio Times were blank. The election looms like an Alp in our minds, dominating our thoughts and blocking out the view beyond. For the Tories, the prospect is one of ministerial cars, red boxes and power after a generation in the wilderness. That's why they are getting increasingly rattled and nasty when the polls suggest anything less than an outright win.

The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, by Tim Bale

If a future historian wants to know why either David Cameron lost the 2010 general election, or, more likely, why the Cameron government was such an abject failure, a clue can be found on p21 of Tim Bale's new book about the Tories. Bale writes: ‘Rather than re-engineering his party, as Blair (and to a lesser extent Kinnock and Smith) did, the Tory leader has only restyled it.'

The casual anti-Jewishness of most of British society, prevalent before the war, and found everywhere from the royal family to TS Eliot to George Orwell, has largely disappeared. Instead, like a virulent bacillus, hatred of Jews finds new hosts: amongst Islamist hate-mongers, the ultra-left and neo-fascists on the streets, and in the upper echelons of academia and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

If you were in student politics in the 1980s you were handed a lot of leaflets. I remember only one. It was given to me by an Iraqi student, who was also a member of the university Labour Club. It was April 1988, and it had a photograph of dead Kurdish women and children lying in the street in Halabja. They were the victims of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. About 5,000 civilians were killed by chemical weapons dropped from Iraqi jets flying repeated sorties over the Kurdish town of Halabja. The weapons contained a combination of mustard gas, sarin, VX, and other nerve agents. Some victims died immediately; others died slowly in unimaginable agonies. Many more were injured, burnt, or blinded and many babies have been born with birth defects since.

Thanks to a seating planner with a sense of humour I found myself sitting next to Andrew Lansley's chief of staff at a private dinner this week. If the Tories win, she will be starting this summer sitting at my old desk in Richmond House as a Tory health special adviser. She seemed perfectly pleasant. It is a shame that her boss's policy of scrapping targets for the NHS will lead to longer waits for operations, visits to the A&E taking 12 hours or more, and people dying unnecessarily because the NHS couldn't help them in time.

When I was at university a friend who was studying sociology read aloud a couple of sentences from the book he was reading. They made us laugh at the time and have stuck with me in the 25 years since. They were from ‘The History Man,' Malcolm Bradbury's satire on trendy academia, and the passage concerned the different attitudes displayed by a middle-class couple towards the homeless people squatting across the road. Barbara Kirk takes them soup and blankets. Howard Kirk, a sociology lecturer at a new south coast university, counts them.

Before we were so rudely interrupted on Wednesday (and let us speak no more about it) Labour could take some comfort from the prologue to the election. On Monday the Tories attempted to ‘shock and awe' us with a spectacular display of offshore-funded fire power. A thousand posters, a mini-manifesto, a visit to Gloucester, and half a million pounds up in smoke. For Labour, a party struggling to pay the staff wage bill every month, it was designed to be both shocking and awesome.

Probably the most dog-eared book in my library is ‘The Keir Hardie calendar: A quotation from the writings and speeches of J. Keir Hardie for every day in the year'.

I bought it in a wonderful second-hand bookshop/cafe in Robin Hood's Bay about 15 years ago (is it still there?). It was published and printed by the National Labour Press at 30 Blackfriars Street, Manchester. The book is undated, but I'm guessing it's from the last years of the century before last.

By his choice of causes to champion, Prince Charles has proved over the decades that he is untroubled by what people think of him. He has pursued unfashionable causes, from alternative medicine to neo-Georgian architecture, with the steadfastness of a man who knows he will never have to face the voters. His political platform is solid gold, whilst those of politicians are built on more ephemeral foundations.

Say what you like about the Tories, they’re cunning, ruthless bastards. The Conservative party’s organising principle is the pursuit and preservation of power. All else is secondary: policies, politicians, principles. Never forget the ruthlessness they displayed in defenestrating Margaret Thatcher when it looked like she might cost them an election. Iain Duncan Smith was brutally slain without the Conservative party even raising its heart rate, like Hannibal Lecter. No loyalty, no emotional attachment, no friendship is bigger for the Tories than the craving for office. Withdrawal from power is as painful for the Tories as its exercise gives pleasure.

Labour will fight the 2010 election, like that in 2005, against a backdrop of war. But Labour will not lose seats over Afghanistan as we did over Iraq, if the party leadership properly explains the reasons for our engagement in the deserts and mountains of Helmand province.

Many years ago, a bright young thing called Stephen Pollard organised a series of meetings, under the banner ‘Two Generations’ at the House of Commons designed to let Labour MPs’ researchers sit at the feet of party grandees and imbibe their wisdom. I attended two (they may have been the only two). One was with Douglas Jay, a treasury minister in Attlee’s government. I remember his eye-patch and his fierce anti-Europeanism. The other was with Len Murray, general secretary of the TUC in the 1970s. Both men are now attending the Great Branch Meeting in the Sky, and Stephen Pollard is the editor of Jewish Chronicle.

There’s a ‘for sale’ outside Labour’s former headquarters at 150 Walworth Road in south London.

There are few clues to the political intrigues and dramas that took place behind the sandstone Georgian facade in the 1980s and early 90s. No plaques above the window from where militants Derek Hatton and Tony Mulhearn waved to supporters as the leadership ordained their expulsion, or above the door to the Labour party bookshop where Tony Benn came into the building (on the extreme left, of course). No echoes of Neil Kinnock’s dignified speech in the early hours of 10th April 1992 conceding defeat, as Tories drove up and down outside chanting ‘four-nil’, or any trace of the floral tributes left by hundreds of Londoners on the day John Smith died.

As a card carrying* member of the middle classes I know a ‘middle class perk’ when I see one. If childcare vouchers are a middle class perk, then Nicholas Winterton is a member of the Fawcett Society. Childcare vouchers are a lifeline for struggling families who want to do the right thing and earn a wage. For many, they are the decisive factor between being able to work and a life on benefits. Two-thirds of the beneficiaries are standard-rate taxpayers. They are not going into the pockets of hedge fund managers and premiership footballers. They help people working for your local council, for the NHS, for small businesses. These are the fabled ‘hard-working families’ that so much of Labour’s rhetoric addresses.

The Taliban greeted police officer Gulbadin with warm congratulations and garlands of flowers after he had murdered five British soldiers. He had joined the Afghan police three years ago, and was being trained by the British to take responsibility for security in Helmand. He waited for the Brits, including the Grenadier Guards’ regimental sergeant-major, to take off their bullet-proof jackets and brew up a pot of tea before he opened machine-gun fire. He escaped on a motorbike. The Taliban were quick to claim credit for the attack; others say he was driven to murderous rage by a conflict with his superiors. Whatever his motivation, he was a coward and a murderer of men whose boots he was not fit to lick.

Lots of people watched last night’s Question Time. Despite not wanting to boost their viewing figures, even by one, I was one of them. We saw Griffin’s unconvincing ‘hard-done-to’ act (‘I’ve been relentlessly attacked and demonised’); his eccentric description of white people as aborigines who’ve been here for ’17,000 years, since the ice melted’; his slur about Jack Straw’s father being imprisoned as a conscientious objector; his highly- selective view of Churchill’s statements on race and immigration; his constant complaining about being ‘misquoted’ and being the ‘most loathed man in Britain’; his justification for sharing a platform with David Duke from KKK, and visiting Libya; his nonsense about ‘genocide’, ‘homosexuality’ and the ‘ultra-leftist BBC’. He did not come across well.

The Taliban and al-Qaida have opened a bloody new front in their war against liberal democracy. They are engaged in a guerrilla war not only in the mountains of Afghanistan, but also on the streets of Pakistan’s cities. Hundreds of people have been killed by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan this year. In the past few days there have been major bomb attacks In Lahore, Peshawar (where the terrorists killed a child), and Kohat, where 11 people where killed by a car bomb.

As the conference season closes, neither Labour nor the Tories are much further ahead than they were a fortnight ago. The big battalions were amassed for the final push; the big guns were wheeled out. But after hard pounding from both sides, little ground has shifted hands and the political battle remains one of attrition. We have a long, cold winter in the political trenches ahead of us.

Of the nineteen Labour party annual conferences I’ve attended – as a delegate, candidate, staffer, and general hanger-on – I think this must be the most important. It is clear that many people have written Labour off for the next election. The battle for blame has begun. Seamus Milne blames defeat on New Labour. Martin Kettle blames it on Brown.

How would you like your cuts? Performed with a scalpel or a chainsaw? Done reluctantly and sensitively by people who will shield your local hospital and school from the blade, or by people who are foaming at the mouth with excitement at the prospect of reducing the size of the state? Peter Mandelson’s speech to Progress on Monday revealed the bare bones of Labour’s election strategy. By the weekend, the strategy has neither unravelled under Tory scrutiny, nor being fatally undermined by our own side briefing against it. If it can survive a week, perhaps at last we have a strategy which we can take into the election next May. Certainly Labour’s decision to make it ‘nice’ Labour cuts versus ‘nasty’ Tory cuts is more robust than the ‘investment versus cuts’ line which was the backdrop to our defeats in several elections since 2007.

Later today the general secretaries of the Britain’s trade unions will congregate at a wisteria-covered country house in Buckinghamshire. Nothing too unusual in that. The big unions have owned big country houses for decades, ostensibly to run them as training colleges for their shop-stewards, although croquet, saunas and swimming have been known to occur. This time it’s different. The house in question is Chequers, and the union bosses are meeting with Gordon Brown, his ministers and advisers. On the agenda will be the recession, cuts to public services, and the Labour manifesto for the general election next year.

Eric Joyce began his political career by attacking the armed forces, his then employer, as ‘racist, sexist and discriminatory’ in a Fabian Society pamphlet. He ended it yesterday by defending the armed forces and attacking the Labour government, his current employer, in a letter to the prime minister.

The only big political story of the summer, apart from the decision by the SNP to release a terrorist bomber into the welcoming, Saltire-waving arms of the Libyans, has been the row over the NHS. On the face of it, Dan Hannan’s extended US media ego-trip was good news for Labour. The Tory MEP proved a useful idiot for the US Republicans, fuelling their fear of socialism with tall tales of soviet-style queues for cancer treatment in the United Kingdom. It allowed Labour to go onto the attack, fielding Andy Burnham to speak up for the NHS, and forced Cameron onto the defensive, including the breath-taking claim that the Conservatives are ‘the party of the NHS’, which displays the same level of cheek as his claim that they are the party of the environment, the party of co-operatives, and the party of the poor. What’s next? The Tories are the party of the trade unions and nuclear disarmament? Watch this space, I hear you cry.

I doubt that Jim Fitzpatrick meant to create a media storm when he removed himself from a constituent’s wedding last week because he wasn’t allowed to sit next to his wife. It wasn’t the first Muslim wedding the couple have attended, but it was the first with segregation. I am sure that he didn’t mean to cause offence to anyone either. I respect his decision, and admire his courage for taking it. I would like to think in the same circumstances, I would do the same.

It is tempting to treat George Osborne’s claim this week that the Tories are the true progressives with the contempt it deserves. The danger in a throwaway remark such as Peter Mandelson’s suggestion that Osborne is a political ‘cross-dresser’ is that it lets the Tories off the hook. For keen observers of the political scene, Osborne’s speech to demos on Tuesday is no more than an obvious continuation of the Tories’ strategy since Cameron became leader. From the sleigh ride through the glaciers, to the support for co-ops, from articles in the Guardian, to promises to keep on funding overseas aid, Cameron has had a simple aim: neutralise the charge of right-wingery that did for Hague and Howard, colonise the centre ground and drive Labour off it, and make a play for the ABC1s and C2D voters who backed Blair three times in a row. The Tories have engaged in the most daring political raid into enemy territory since, well since we did it to them in the 1990s.

Like most people engaged full-time in politics, I was ensnared as a teenager. I grew up in the three-car capital of Britain - Gerrards Cross, in South Buckinghamshire. I went to a prep school (where, for a term in the 1930s, John Betjeman had been the games master), then on to the local grammar school.

There’s nothing like a factory occupation to set lefties’ hearts aflutter.

The idea of workers taking control of the means of production has the romance of the biennio rosso, the ‘two red years’ 1920-21 when Italian workers occupied car factories in Turin, or the heroism of the work-in by the shipbuilders on the Upper Clyde in 1971, with Tony Benn and Jimmy Reid leading the demonstrations. Factory occupations are to working class activism what signing a petition or spending a night at a peace camp is to middle class activism. Proper workers often find their efforts emulated by wannabe proletarians on campus, with students occupying university buildings to abolish capitalism, fix the Middle East conflict, or avoid writing essays.

In the past few minutes, the result from the by-election in Norwich North has been announced. The Conservatives have gained the seat for the first time since 1992, with a majority of 7,348.

If you found yourself on the terrace of the House of Commons in the first half of the 1980s, what dominated the view was not, as now, the London Eye. It was a huge banner unfurled across the front of County Hall, with the ever-growing number of London’s unemployed emblazoned upon it.

In The Napoleon of Notting Hill Gilbert Keith Chesterton describes the game that the human race (‘to which so many of my readers belong’) has been playing since the start of time, which he calls ‘Cheat the Prophet’. ‘The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen then go and do something else instead.’

My top three political-speeches-gone-wrong are Howard Dean's ‘I have a scream' in 2004, Kinnock's calamitous ‘We're alright' at the Sheffield Rally in 1992, and Peter Mandelson's victory speech in 2001 where he informed us he was a ‘fighter not a quitter.'

In the Dog and Duck, outside school gates, across garden fences, the talk is of little else. Britain nervously anticipates the publication next week of the new ‘National Plan’. Queues will form outside Waterstones, as the public eagerly awaits Labour’s proposals to take Britain from recession to recovery, from doldrums to the high seas. Not since the publication of Lord Denning’s report into the Profumo scandal, which sold 4,000 copies in the first hour, has a government document been so much in demand.

Gibraltar has its Barbary apes, and the Tower of London its ravens. For Labour, we always had Tom Watson’s opposition to electoral reform. The globe needs its fixed points, otherwise we’d all get confused and fall off.