THERE ARE a series of important elections across the country scheduled for May. It is important to state at the outset that everyone should vote Labour, as I have always done. Whatever disagreement we may have within the Labour Party and they are often very serious, any Labour candidate is a better option than any Tory or Lib Dem.

But enthusiasm and exhortation alone are not enough to win elections, otherwise Labour would trounce the Tories every time. You also need strategy and you need the tactics that flow from that. Perhaps one of the most appropriate, but least expected places to look for strategic guidance is the Blair leadership.

Naturally, I do not mean Blair or Mandelson, who offer only a distortion of what they themselves did. But we need to examine both the successes and failures of the Blair period to genuinely learn from it.