AR: Yes, absolutely. I quote Blair towards the end of his premiership when he said to some investment bankers, "I've always been saying throughout my premiership that you guys should just be left to get on with making money for yourselves..." And then, an afterthought, "...and for the country." 

NC: It is very interesting how little the Tory party features in your book. I mean, really not until the last page.

AR: They knock themselves out of contention for New Labour's first two parliaments. During the Iain Duncan Smith period they made Sicilians look like amateurs at feuding. Although Michael Howard somewhat stabilised them, it really struck me that by then they were on their fourth leader who was a protégé of Margaret Thatcher, which was just one sign that they hadn't broken out of the box. Talking to Tories, most of them would, I think, now accept their failing as an opposition. I don't think they were ever going to win 2001 because the country had made up its mind to give Labour eight years in 1997. But by 2005, especially when Blair became very unpopular over Iraq, they should have made more progress towards a more modernised position. But what's interesting about Cameron, and what is a more positive point about New Labour, is that the basic New Labour prospectus — which was to have economic efficiency with decent public services and social justice — is still an attractive one. The public finds it attractive and it is one reason why the Tories are still struggling now because Cameron and Osborne signed up to that. They were going to be Blairites but were just going to deliver it better than New Labour. Nobody has moved on from this position. That's why the Conservatives are nervous at the moment. I think the country might be very disillusioned and disaffected with Labour, and Gordon is a very unpopular leader, but actually the country really quite likes that as a prospectus. It is an attractive one. 

DJ: I was very struck by the email I got from Cameron — along with millions of other people so not a very personal one — which manages to use in a very short paragraph the words "radical" and "modern" about eight times. Culturally, New Labour has left a massive legacy and Tories have very little actually to put in the balance against it. Just as Blair was hugely influenced by Thatcher so Cameron, inevitably I think, is to some extent the heir to Blair. 

AR: That certainly is true. But it is a question, to what extent did Blair, and other people, create that legacy or did they just move with the time? But it is certainly true. Mid-1997, extraordinary as it may seem, the police were not subject to race-relations legislation. They are now. We've had — not enough — but we've had black faces in cabinet for the first time, we had more women in the cabinet than before and big advances for gay rights. And that has been, I think, one of the attractive things about the New Labour era. Cameron has adjusted to that. He got the Tory conference to applaud gay marriage. So Cameron has moved things along a bit. There is a danger though, that you make a category error that just because a party has more female candidates or more non-white candidates or more gay candidates in other respects it makes it more socially progressive. Because it doesn't — you can be gay Labour or you can be gay Tory. Just because somebody is gay this does not make them left-wing, sometimes far from it. So yes, I think he has made his party look a bit more like the country. But you can't read on too much more from that. 

In terms of the social history of this country, one of the great ironies is that Gordon Brown, the self-proclaimed owner of the moral compass, personally quite austere, will have to face up to himself at some point or account for it: he presides over this age of amazing avarice, of which one of the cultural icons is the ghastly jewelled Damien Hirst skull.