The legacy theme was explicit in Labour’s manifesto. Seen another way, this is what Gordon Brown hopes to inherit. The transition has begun. Mr Brown smothered Mr Blair in compliments. Both presented the unspoken handover as a seamless ideological continuum, rather than the end of new Labour. However temporary and expedient, the Blair-Brown double act remains formidable.

Both also put the election in historial context. During the long initial credo by the “magnificent seven” at the front of the stage at the Mermaid, Mr Brown said that, in time, the 1997 settlement would be seen to be as important as the 1945 settlement. For Mr Blair, the election is about “embedding a progessive consensus”. These remarks raise two questions. First, is there a 1997 settlement in any way comparable to the post-1945 changes, or the post-1979 ones? And, second, what does entrenchment or embedding really mean?

Talk of a postwar settlement or consensus, or a Thatcherite one, is much disputed by historians. Many of the changes, from nationalisation to privatisation, were bitterly contested at the time. The key stage is when the Opposition accepts, however grudgingly, that it cannot reverse the big changes.

By 1951, for example, public ownership of the main utilities, creation of the NHS and a big extension of the welfare state had been largely accepted by the Conservatives, despite mutterings from the Right. The only important action which the Churchill Government reversed was iron and steel nationalisation. The Tories concentrated on scrapping wartime and austerity controls.

In 1987, many of the main Thatcher measures, such as what were then the only partly completed programmes of utility privatisation, changes to the legal position of trade unions and cuts in direct taxes were strongly opposed by Labour. It was only after Mr Blair became leader in 1994 that Labour no longer proposed reversing many of these changes.

The position is different now, largely because the Blair Government has so far achieved less than either Attlee or Thatcher. Everyone was quite clear what these governments were trying to do, at least within a year or two of winning office. But Mr Blair’s goals and record are less clear cut. That is revealed by the search for new overarching themes: first, the Third Way (unmentioned yesterday) and, now, the “progressive consensus”. At times, there has been the sense of looking for coherence.

In terms of achievement, the Blair team can point to making the Bank of England responsible for setting interest rates; the reductions in long-term and youth unemployment; the minimum wage; the big cut in pensioner and child poverty; Scottish and Welsh devolution; the Human Rights Act; and improvements in performance in parts of the public services.

This is hardly a negligible list, but it does not amount to a remaking of the landscape. In part, of course, the Blair record is still a work in progress. Reform of public services really developed momentum only after 2001, as Mr Blair concedes. Revealingly, he admitted that, although life might have been easier in 2001, yesterday’s manifesto is stronger and weightier. More thought has gone into yesterday’s commitments, many of which came earlier in the five-year plans for public services. While the Brown camp had doubts then, no one could have been more supportive of private sector provision of services than Mr Brown yesterday.

There are ambitious plans for diversity and choice in health and education. If the Government achieves its goals — of a maximum 18-week wait between GP referral and hospital treatment by 2008; patient choice of hospitals and treatment; 200 independent academies in poorer areas by 2010; a big extension of vocational education; and universal childcare — then Labour will be able to claim to have transformed the welfare state to meet individual needs. But not yet.

Many left-wing critics regard this as a right-wing, quasi-Thatcherite agenda. Admittedly, academies are modelled on the City Technology Colleges of the Tory years, just as some of the NHS reforms can be traced to the pre-1997 agenda. But the extent of the help for the poor and childcare policies would not have been introduced by the Tories. So there are real differences between the parties, and not just the much exaggerated ones over taxation and spending.

Moreover, because the Blair record is in itself incomplete, it is premature to talk of a settlement. Mr Blair said yesterday that new Labour’s changes would be embedded when they were accepted by the Tories. By this he meant the Conservatives accepting taxpayer-financed, if not entirely state-provided, health and schooling, as opposed to the current Tory proposals for opting out via the patient and pupil passports. Mr Blair believes a third Labour victory will make the Tories reconsider “how they work, how they think, how they then go and win support”.

He is right that a third big Labour victory, still not certain, would/should force a Tory rethink as profound as Labour’s after 1992. But for all Mr Blair’s confidence yesterday, there remains a hidden, nagging doubt that he has not achieved as much as hoped to do in the heady days of May 1997. His legacy is still in doubt.

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