Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister | Ian Forsyth/Getty The ruins of Labour How can a routed party recover? A devilish question, but a return to Blairism isn’t the answer.

LONDON — There were two big winners from Thursday’s general election: David Cameron and Tony Blair.

We have heard nothing directly from Blair so far, but his allies are already celebrating.

They regard the comprehensive rejection of Ed Miliband by British voters as a vindication of everything that they and Blair represent.

Within hours of the result, John Reid, Blair’s most effective henchman, was publicly savaging Miliband, asserting that Labour lost because it was “on the wrong side” of the most important arguments, from the economy to immigration.

On May 9, another Blairite cabinet minister, Alan Johnson, called on the Labour Party to learn the lessons of Blair’s three consecutive election victories.

Several more of Blair’s cabinet ministers, including David Blunkett and Charles Clarke, have called for Labour to recapture the centre ground.

Their prescription is curious after a general election in which the three parties which rejected the centre ground — the SNP, UKIP and the Greens — made the biggest gains in the popular vote.

Meanwhile the party which made the greatest claim to the centre ground — the Liberal Democrats — was virtually annihilated.

Fact and truth, however, have rarely interfered with any New Labour narrative. Blair established their “line to take” on the general election result long before a single vote was cast, in a sideswipe at Miliband last year: "Traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result."

Now the Blairites are once again looking for a leader. According to reports, they have alighted upon shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt, Labour’s education spokesman. Both of these politicians are youngish, reasonably capable, good-looking, and can boast a superhuman range of media contacts.

But I am not convinced by either. Life has moved on since Tony Blair’s time, and his trick cannot be repeated.

Blair’s special art was his ability to appeal to two completely different audiences. On the one hand he could rely on Labour’s historic base among the remains of the working class and the trade unions.

On the other hand, Blair, a former public schoolboy, offered reassurance for the English middle classes who had traditionally voted Conservative.

Blair's 1997 program was rightly described as 'the sliced white bread of British politics': It had nothing at all that might stick in the teeth of any major voting group

For the unions, at least he delivered a Labour government after 18 Tory years. At the same time, he was brilliant at making the middle classes feel that he shared their fears and their aspirations. He also systematically eliminated everything they had disliked about the old Labour party — particularly high taxation, economic irresponsibility, weakness on law and order and defence, and anything which smacked of traditional socialism. Blair offered them a shining new country with no pain at all.

To please both groups, Blair devised a program in 1997 which was rightly described as “the sliced white bread of British politics." It had nothing at all that might stick in the teeth of any major voting group, although a few grains of mainstream Labour policy (such as the minimum wage) were added back to give the loaf some nutritional value. Blair’s personal lack of interest in the minimum wage can be seen in his memoirs, where it occupies far less space than the opening night of the millennium dome.

Crucial to Blair’s appeal was the assumption that government never needed to make a choice between competing social classes or other major interests. On every issue, especially the economy, there was a set of policies which was right for everybody.

In the short term this tactic worked very well indeed, supplying Labour with huge majorities in 1997, 2001 and 2005. Blair was lucky with his Conservative opponents and luckier still with the economy. He inherited the best economic legacy of any incoming Labour government and enjoyed the most favourable global economic environment. In spite of these advantages, Blair managed to lose four million votes between 1997 and 2005, and over the longer term, Labour has paid a huge price for his outlook and methods.

Fatally, Blair’s New Labour took the working class vote for granted, as the case of Scotland shows. Scotland was far more left wing than the rest of Britain, which embarrassed New Labour.

New Labour was happy to rely on Scottish votes to get elected, and (after devolution) to use Scottish MPs to force New Labour policies on the English which they rejected for their own country. But after the death of John Smith, the quintessential Scotsman who was Blair’s predecessor as leader of Labour, the party in London became steadily more distant from the voters in Scotland.

As Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw have shown in their well-researched book, The Strange Death of Labour Scotland, Blair allowed the Scottish Labour party to atrophy. The Scots started to regard Labour as a foreign intruder, rather its own representative.

The arrival of Blair’s Scottish successor made no difference: Gordon Brown was soon too engulfed by crisis to develop his own agenda. Except in style and rhetoric, he was as much a New Labour figure as Tony Blair and as much a representative of English ascendancy. The SNP took full advantage of New Labour’s disdain for Scotland, and on May 7 Labour reaped the whirlwind.

In England, the challenge has come from UKIP. Voters in Labour’s northern heartlands also felt disenfranchised under New Labour. They felt that Labour was run by a London elite who did not their concerns, above all immigration, seriously.

Matthew Goodwin, the political scientist, has shown that UKIP polled higher in the North East and Yorkshire (16.7 percent of the popular vote, and 18 percent in Ed Miliband’s Doncaster) than any other region of Britain. In London, more affluent and more socially diverse, UKIP polled only 8.2 percent. These figures suggest that Labour is losing the working class vote in its provincial heartlands.

New Labour's failure to accept responsibility, and their indifference to truth, led to a general collapse of trust in our public life.

It is important to remember that Labour came into existence more than a century ago precisely in order to protect working men against immigrant (mainly Irish) competition which drove down wages and stole jobs.

In power, New Labour favored unlimited immigration, a policy which was strongly supported by employers. Meanwhile Tony Blair established a policy of defining himself in opposition to traditional unionized working-class voters by repeating attacking them. He treated the Labour party like Basil Fawlty on Gourmet Night — abusing the long-stay residents in the hope of attracting a better clientele.

Finally, Tony Blair and New Labour paid the price of appealing to “what works." Many of his policies did not work at all, and created unnecessary loss and even suffering. Apart from the Iraq war, he and his New Labour successor presided over the banking collapse, economic recession, failure to reform welfare or taxation, horror stories in the NHS, and billions wasted on ill-judged initiatives, especially in IT. Worse still, New Labour never accepted responsibility for error and failure. This quality, allied to their indifference to truth, led to a general collapse of trust in our public life.

This is why today’s calls for a return to the so called centre-ground policies of the Blairs are certain to fail. No one, except for a small coterie of politicians and their influential and well-placed media supporters, regards the Blair era as a Golden Age in British life. Even if it were, Labour has no way of getting back there. The conditions which allowed Tony Blair his success have disappeared.

Labour’s crying need is to offer people — especially the traditional voters it has lost — a sense that it actually stands for something. This may be an impossible task. The Labour Party, which has achieved so much for Britain over the last century, may be about to disappear from England and Wales, as it already done in Scotland. In any case, David Cameron is the real heir to Blair.

Peter Oborne is associate editor of the Spectator. He recently resigned as chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph. He was voted columnist of the year at the 2013 Press Gazette awards and is author of The Triumph of the Political Class.