Not Tony Blair; he was offered the keys of Fort Knox.So he was in a position to do pretty much what he liked. As the former Labour minister Frank Field said recently, if Tony Blair had told the British people to walk on water, they would have set out for the Sea of Galilee Mr Blair had two great tasks which he wished to accomplish. Tony Blair’s character is now under scrutiny, and rightly so. Britain deserves a Prime Minister who tells the truth.
Few prime ministers have enjoyed the opportunities he had in 1997. He won an enormous majority; he inherited a healthy economy; he was facing a discredited Opposition; he was buoyed up by public goodwill.

Many voters dislike personal attacks during election campaigns They would prefer politicians to stick to the issues But there are times when the politician is the issue. To most of us, the idea of going for a swim in an open-air pond on a freezing winter morning sounds less than appealing. But to members of the Hampstead Heath Winter Swimming Club, it is clearly one of life’s great pleasures. And yesterday’s news that the club has won its High Court battle against the Corporation of London, and that its members will henceforth be allowed to swim – unsupervised – in the ponds of Hampstead Heath, is to be welcomed by everyone who cares about freedom.
This is a victory for common sense in the face of small-minded bureaucrats.

Londoners have been swimming in these ponds for almost two centuries John Constable depicted bathers in a painting of 1829. And in all that time, there has not been one recorded case of death or injury to a swimmer.The dispute arose after the Corporation of London cut the number of hours when lifeguards would be available – and then refused Hampstead bathers permission to swim unsupervised in the morning. Safety regulations – which the corporation cited in support of its decision – ought to be respected. But all too often authorities hide behind them when they choose to curtail legitimate and long-standing public activities. What they are really doing is trying to make their own jobs easier.The case was won by the bathers after a precedent was found in a ruling by Lord Hoffmann last year. He seemed to sum up the whole business perfectly: “If people want to dive into ponds or lakes, that is their affair.”Quite right.

The water may be less than lovely, but if the bathers of Hampstead Heath want to swim in it, good for them.. Tony Blair this week raised a letter I sent to him warning of the campaign tactics of Lynton Crosby, whom Michael Howard has hired to run his campaign. As I pointed out to Mr Blair, we in the Australian Labor Party have come to know Mr Crosby’s tactics well Now I see them in operation in the UK general election. Now I see them in operation in the UK general election.
Just listen to the words of Michael Howard on asylum and immigration over the last two weeks, and it is clear how closely the British Conservatives have been copying the Australian premier John Howard’s 2001 campaign tactic of exploiting fear and race as a substitute for a longer-term policy debate about the future of your country. I feel an overwhelming sense of d? vu.Mr Crosby first trialled these fear campaigns in the 1992 Queensland state election, for which I was then Premier Wayne Goss’s campaign director. In that campaign, Mr Crosby authorised the broadcast of a cynical television advertisement in which the death of a young Queenslander was exploited for political gain.The case was also raised in negative newspaper advertisements that accused the Queensland Labor Party of being responsible for a tragic death brought about as a result of government policy.

The television advertisement was fiercely criticised, and the Liberal/National Parties were forced to withdraw it quickly in the face of wide condemnation. But Mr Crosby found that it did the trick.This type of campaign has been Mr Crosby’s hallmark ever since. He refined his noxious tactics with the assistance of US Republican Party consultants and his partner, Mark Textor, who has been accused of “push polling” (feeding voters “information” about a candidate under the guise of taking a poll to see how this “information” affects voter preferences). Mr Textor’s techniques, coupled with Crosby’s cynicism, have proved deadly to progressive parties in the past.Mr Crosby’s 2001 Australian election campaign was perhaps the most despicable waged in Australian political history. It set out deliberately to vilify asylum-seekers, to imply that they were possible terrorists, and to signal a crack-down on immigration. Most of the asylum-seekers exiled in the “Pacific Solution” (in which “boat people” from Indonesia were held in camps on two ocean islands) were subsequently granted entry to Australia.Again, Mr Crosby did not let the facts get in the way of the campaign. While in the UK recently, I saw coverage of the Tories’ adverts in the local press in which they claimed that money spent on asylum and immigration could have been used to lower council tax.