Teachers were scolded for insufficient enthusiasm about the Government’s standards drive. Doctors and managers, the NHS elite, are to be tested on the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the drugs and treatments they prescribe. Here was an extraordinarily forthright attack on the complacency of the public sector middle classes, protected hereto by the carefully-tended perception that they “do a wonderful job” and that it is somehow mean-minded to ask whether this is actually true in all cases.
Here was a speech of coded warnings of toughness on just about every front – in the economy, in education, towards the criminally inclined and the trade unions. Having roughed up his own party, he is now setting out on the really difficult bit: roughing up the rest of us. New Labour has been accused of being disproportionately tough on the poor and workless. Now it was the turn of others, less accustomed to the smack of firm government, to be the intended recipients of Mr Blair’s pep talk.

Business was politely and firmly told to stop moaning about the high pound and attend to its low productivity. The hallowed strains were an invitation to a mood of sober reflection: this time, the Prime Minister was saying, it is time to get serious. THE MUSICAL build-up in Blackpool had changed from the usual feelgood disco stomp to the soaring, sonorous harmonies of an African choir. Not a note, verbal or musical, is struck in the Winter Gardens without precise calculation of its effect on our spirits. God will say: they were not smart, they were certainly not virtuous, but look at them now They used to have a nightmare called apartheid That has ended Your problem, too, will be solved.. What did people expect us to do to extract information? There was ultimately nothing we could do, short of putting them on the rack and torturing them.We are going to succeed because God wants us to succeed.

God wants to point to us – South Africa is an unlikely example to be held up to the rest of the world. If our case was so hopeless, imagine the hope it can give to others. We were accused of being soft on Mrs Winnie Mandela, and with Mr PW Botha. But nobody else went through an 11-day grilling such as that of Mrs Mandela and we got her, even if reluctantly, to say “sorry”, perhaps for the first time in public. In some respects there was a 007 air about it, with various gadgets for poisoning opponents.