As I write this I can see a picture of my youngest daughter holding a Union Jack looking quizzically at Tony Blair as he prepares to enter Downing Street for the first time. Ten years later she is upstairs answering mock A-level papers on the rise of new Labour. So quickly does the present become the past, and all of us are consigned to history.

Nine years ago I wrote a book, The Unfinished Revolution, to record what really happened on that extraordinary journey to Downing Street as Labour moved from serial defeat to unprecedented victory. The book was based on the premise that Labour lost elections because it failed to change, but won in 1997 because it modernised and reconnected with the electorate. It argued that the need to change did not stop with election success but was a permanent necessity, progressive politics only succeeding when constantly adapting to new times.

The unfinished revolution is rooted not in Labour’s traditional industrial heartlands but in the sprawling suburbs of an emerging middle class. Labour lost elections because it turned its back on this new constituency, ignoring the postwar rise of a newly aspirational electorate. The purpose of new Labour was to reconnect with these voters, the culmination of an arc of endeavour and ideas stretching back to the revisionism of the 1950s, when Hugh Gaitskell first attempted to abandon Clause Four. Labour had to be in touch always with ordinary people, he said, “to avoid becoming small cliques of isolated doctrine-ridden fanatics, out of touch with the life of our time”: a perfect articulation of the modernising credo.

Reading The Unfinished Revolution again, nine years on, is to step back to another country. Then, to many, Labour was almost physically feared, a dark presence impossible to vote for. The Conservatives dominated almost every corner of the political terrain , with Labour effectively vanquished. After the 1992 election many believed that the party would never hold power again. No one for a single moment would have entertained the possibility that Labour would win three successive elections, be leading in opinion polls at the heart of a third term and be on course for a fourth election victory. Now it is Michael Portillo who asks the question: “Will the Tories ever hold power again?” Nor would anyone have expected the complete transformation of the political landscape.

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Twenty years ago Conservative political hegemony was total. Now the progressive political settlement completely dominates. No one seriously questions the importance of society, the centrality of public services, the urgent need to end poverty and widen opportunity. A pivotal moment in the 1987 election campaign was Margaret Thatcher’s defence of private medicine. She said that she wanted to go into hospital “on the day that I want, at the time that I want, and with the doctor that I want”. Last week David Cameron said that Labour’s ten goals for the NHS laid out in the 2000 White Paper should be enshrined into law. New Labour has changed the political landscape almost completely.

This is an extraordinary achievement by Mr Blair, who with Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher has the rare post-war distinction of being a political leader who genuinely established a new political hegemony. As new Labour has changed, so too has Britain – The Economist describing “a period of extraordinary prosperity” with less poverty, less crime and renewed political clout. In the Blair years Britain has become more tolerant, more modern and more at ease with itself in a postwar, postimperial era. This did not happen by chance but through a series of brave modernising choices ranging from the independence of the Bank of England to the devolution of power, to gay adoption, to the public-private provision of public services.

It is true that the pace of modernisation has been uneven. It took time for Labour to find its feet with public service reform and it was only in his 2003 conference speech that Mr Blair was really able to articulate his public service vision: “Choice has always been there for the well-off. What is unfair is not the right to choose, not the pursuit of excellence, but where that choice and that excellence depends on your wealth not your need.” This was the exact opposite of what Mrs Thatcher had said 20 years ago.

It has been in Blair’s third term that most progress has been made towards turning that vision into serious policy reality, with choice becoming a given in the NHS and our education system now genuinely moving towards diversity. It is clear that modernisation has filled out as a concept over the years of government, gradually emerging as a big idea based on giving power to individuals in a world of change. Empowerment was always intrinsic to new Labour, based as it is on the need to respect and connect with the aspirations of a changing electorate, but only now has it emerged as the dominant idea for the next stage of modernisation.

Could new Labour have done more and done it faster? Of course. But politics is always a journey, and it is impossible to know when you start what you will have learnt by the end. All you can do is relentlessly change, and always seek to seize the future, knowing that the revolution can never, ever be finished. New Labour retains its extraordinary political dominance because it had the courage to change. Now it changes again, and the reforming power of a new leader is unleashed.

Certainly Gordon Brown will be different, and so he should be, but the long arc of modernisation will not be broken. Tomorrow Tony Blair leaves the stage, but the future remains new Labour, the only party of genuine change in Britain today.

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