Time for Blair to put on his bifocals

The best of times and the worst of times: after an embarrassing parliamentary reverse last week and yet another stratospherically high poll rating at the weekend, this seems a good moment to contemplate the paradoxes of Tony Blair's new Labour. Here is a party that is popular, strongly led and fresh-seeming, yet whose radical meaning, if it has one, is still unclear. It is a powerful force. That's obvious. But a force for what?

As far as a large number of voters are concerned, the answer is simply that Labour is the force that will expel the Conservatives from office. The 30-point lead given to Labour by NOP in the Sunday Times is incredible, literally in that it is hard to find a politician who believes Labour would be more than 10 points ahead in a real general election.

Yet however you unpack the figures, they are eloquent evidence of a country fed up to the back teeth with Torydom; 10 points would do the job. At the end of conference season, and despite John Major's rallying speech, it is hard to see the Conservatives clawing their way back. Devastatingly, Labour is now seen as the moderate party, safer than the Government.

The challenge for Blair is to keep those people with him, while developing a radical programme for government, with its internal timetable of legislation to be achieved after a year, two years, and so on. It is bifocal politics. Through the bottom lens, the "moderate" tag is an election-winner. But from a longer perspective, the party is bound to fail in government if it merely administers the present system. So it needs to plan reforms for years ahead.

Bifocal politics is a difficult game. It means thinking about two almost wholly separate situations, pre-election oppositionism and post-election government, at the same time. They require different language and different strategies. It must be like trying to play jazz piano while composing poetry.

Alongside his day-to-day campaigning, Blair has been quietly assembling private groups of advisers and freelance helpers to discuss the government programme - senior Whitehall-type people as well as the usual economic and business advisers. But his most significant move is one that will be little noticed by that buzzing world of hangers-on outside Westminster. It is the appointment of Donald Dewar as his Chief Whip.

Dewar is an unusual politician, fair-minded, pessimistic and fastidious. But he has one of the best minds in the Commons and will be an absolutely key figure in Blair's team, both now and (if they make it) in government. His appointment is inspired.

He joins the inner sanctum, the top five. It is no secret that the key men around Blair - Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, John Prescott, Jack Straw - are not consumed by the ardour of their mutual admiration. Dewar, though, is admired by all of them; his seriousness, his pessimism, his high-mindedness will be very useful to Blair in checking quarrels and avoiding short-term or short-cut thinking. No group of four or five gathered together with Donald Dewar is likely to come to arrogant or over-confident conclusions.

Coincidentally, but fittingly, the need for him was demonstrated only last week by the failure of the attack on Michael Howard in the Commons. It showed that a certain style of Opposition politics has now run its course. I suspect we have reached the end of macho LA Law oppositionism, dependent upon cod-prosecutions of ministers with mounds of technical evidence, smoking faxes, leaked memos, subtly different texts compared at the dispatch box, and so on.

Labour has in the past done real damage this way: John Smith, Gordon Brown and Robin Cook were among the politicians whose forensic attacks made their reputations. It is the kind of thing newspapers love. Any journalist loves the hunt and most of us become priapic at the very mention of a leaked ministerial fax. But Labour has moved on. It is now a proto-government, not the provisional wing of investigative journalism. What is at stake now isn't the odd ministerial scalp but the running of the country.

Now, Dewar has always hated personalised politics - indeed, he has been too fastidious. I well remember the journalistic frustration of trying to get a quote from him about a Tory MP who had attacked him in highly offensive terms when he was Shadow Scottish Secretary and being sternly reproved: "No, Andrew, I don't want to take unfair advantage of the poor man; I'm sure he didn't mean it."

In his recent job he has avoided personal attacks on Peter Lilley, the Social Security Secretary, who therefore moderated his own language; that debate has benefited as a result. As Labour's Chief Whip, with a new team, he has immense power over the party's tactics and I predict that we'll see, over the next few months, a change for the better.

So alongside the teams of people thinking about constitutional legislation, the remodelling of the No 10 machine, the priorities for social legislation and other matters, Dewar's arrival is another snippet of reassuring evidence that Blair won't make the Bill Clinton mistake - win brilliantly and then arrive in power utterly unprepared for the job.

There is, however, a downside. It is that those with radical enthusiasm for a Blair government are likely to be frustrated. This man is going to play it long. No one who intended a rush of helter-skelter reforms, a torrent of change, would have appointed Dewar as his Chief Whip. Blair wants change at a steady pace, while he keeps the support of Middle Britain and plans yet further ahead, for another term. He believes, rightly, that no economic changes worth having can be completed in just a few years.

This is long-termism with a vengeance, just what Harold Wilson never delivered. But there are drawbacks. Step-by-step caution makes it easier for a government to lose momentum and to be slowly hypnotised by the daily job of administration. Without an energetic big bang, an honest desire for reform can degenerate all too easily into consolidation; sensible "first things first" slides into dispiriting "safety first".

Consolidation is not what Britain needs. Pursuing the needed reforms to the centralised and ossified political system, breaking down the worrying concentrations of private power and diverting scarce public resources to education and employment would all be controversial. Serious enemies would arise, in the private sector and the public sector. Making Blair's "young country" would require steel, grit and a splash of chutzpah.

Whether Labour is really ready for that visionary challenge is the great imponderable of British politics, a matter of personal faith, not political science. But at least it is clear that the Tory charge in the Commons last week and in Blackpool the week before - that Labour is not fit to govern, and would plunge the country into chaos if it tried - is now absolutely the wrong way round. Labour is fit to rule, or at least as fit as the Conservatives. And the danger isn't chaos; it's tranquillity.