Wilson was the first British politician to woo popular musicians, but he was by no means the last. As the long Tory hegemony began to crumble in the mid-1990s, both sides looked for support from the musical world. It was symptomatic that the then Prime Minister, John Major, should look to the more senior end of the business, giving knighthoods to Cliff Richard (born 1940) and Paul McCartney (born 1942), while Blair targeted a younger constituency. An early sign of his strategy was the visit in 1995 by Damon Albarn of Blur to the Houses of Parliament at the invitation of the Labour Party. There Albarn conferred with John Prescott, Alistair Campbell and Blair on how the Labour Party's appeal to the young might be enhanced.

Blair’s credentials as a patron of pop were much more impressive than Wilson’s a generation earlier. This had less to do with age — Blair was 41 in 1995, Wilson was 48 in 1964 — than with style. Blair did not smoke a pipe or go on holiday in the Scilly Isles. Moreover, as his publicists were keen to emphasise, Blair had been a rock musician while a student at Oxford, playing guitar and singing in a group called Ugly Rumours. One of his fellow musicians recalled: “He had a kind of Mick Jagger-esque delivery. Quite high, not enormous volume. But it was coupled with this very entertaining act. He definitely modelled himself on Jagger. There was a lot of ‘Well, alright!

As with Wilson’s victory over Douglas-Home in 1964, it is impossible to assess how much Blair was helped by his identification with youth culture in achieving his landslide victory in May, 1997. He certainly continued to cultivate the popular-music scene, never missing an opportunity to be photographed holding a guitar or to broadcast his musical enthusiasms (U2, the Foo Fighters, the Darkness), and letting it be known that he plays his guitar every day.