Labour at last has a modern leader ready to sweep to power and end this sorry era.

The longer and more frequently I contemplate Mr Blair, the more I like the cut of his jib. This has nothing to do with the alternative; I long ago concluded that the present Government was worm-eaten, exhausted, dishonest, incompetent, lazy, mendacious, ignorant, rotten, false, disreputable, deceitful, unsavoury, squalid, abominable, soiled, piratical, shifty, discreditable, infamous, improper, obscene, hateful, impure, degraded, dilapidated, shabby, grovelling, discredited, renownless, tarnished, disgraced, shameless, creeping, abject, two-faced, unscrupulous, villainous, treacherous, untrustworthy, prevaricating, sinister, crawling, insincere, fishy, spurious, unclean, felonious, infamous, venal, base, vile, bribable, rancid, disloyal, scheming, unsavoury, sickening, fetid, nauseating, putrid, defaulting, mouldering, evil, vicious, damnable, maleficent, wrong, ineffectual, mean, inferior, contemptible, superficial, irrelevant, expendable, powerless, pathetic, nugatory, impotent, jumped-up, cheap, insalubrious, flea-ridden, unsound, nasty, baneful, foul-tonged, cursed, unwarranted, execrable, damned, abnormal, unreasonable, virtueless, peccant, sinful, unworthy, hopeless, incorrigible, tergiversating, brutalised, nefarious, culpable, scandalous, worthless, flagitious, gross, indefensible and unpardonable to say the least. But Blair, as far as I can see, is to be found on his own feet, not measuring by the scabrous (I missed that one) Lilliputians now arrayed against him.

The pitiful disarray into which the Tories have fallen (I am glad to say) is made clear by the way they have just been clutching at a straw so frail that even I almost shed a tear for them: it turns out that many years ago Mr Blair was a member of the Parliamentary Labour CND, along with some other 100 Labour MPs. (Well; it's obvious, isn't it? He calls himself Blair, but I happen to know his real name is Blairovich.)

So feeble was the attempt to smear Blair with such rubbish that I am surprised to see Heseltine who, to do him justice, usually has more sense than to put his head into bags so ludicrous trying to whip such rancid cream. But even before that, we learnt that the Tories were being asked to lay off attacking Blair and to turn their almost extinct fire on John Prescott; the great Tory brains had discovered (several months in arrears) that bashing Blair was doing nothing but making him better known and more to the liking of the voters, so Prescott, less raffine than Blair and perhaps more accident-prone, was to be the target from now on. And that, dear readers, is the quality of the intelligence coming out of Central Office.

Blair casts himself as EU president candidate

Speaking on French TV, Tony Blair sang the praises of the EU and sketched his agenda for its future, all in fluent French

Multimedia

• The Blair years: video, pictures and analysis

• Interactive Blair Timeline

• BlairTube

BACKGROUND

• The past decade a disaster?

• All about Iraq? Don’t you believe it

• I’ll give Blair six and a half out of ten

Multimedia

• Blair fashion gallery

• Cherie Blair picture gallery

• Brookes on Blair

But I did not come here today to tell the Tories to go and drown themselves, though if I thought they would do so I would push them to the sharks by hundreds. No, I came here to say that I cannot see any reason at all why I should not vote Labour at the next general election, and that I shall therefore do so. Never mind that the election is more than a year off, for just as I cannot think of anything that would stop me voting Labour, so I cannot think of anything so tremendous that it would make the Tories less vile, less mendacious, less stupid and less corrupt.

Have you noticed the curious similarity between Mr Major and President Clinton? Neither of them has any idea of what to do, so Clinton is told by his dreadful advisers that it would be a good idea to invade Haiti, though I don't imagine that Clinton even knows where it is, and Major is similarly told by similar creatures that it would be useful for him to stand up to someone important in the EU. So he stood up to Mr Dehaene, though it was obvious that he didn't know what Dehaene did, or what his name was, couldn't have spelt it if he had, and quite certainly wouldn't have been able to pronounce it. Then everything goes as it obviously would: Clinton makes a complete shambles of the Haiti "invasion'', and his standing with the American people slides further, and Major makes a complete shambles of the standing up bit, because the first time Jacques Santer opened his mouth after becoming President-designate it was to make clear that he was a passionate supporter of every scrap of the EU, and the British would have to come to heel.

Meanwhile, what of Mr Blair? Well, he will have a rocky ride when the comrades discover what kind of leader they have. Not long ago, I was discussing the culture of defeat; that strange, touching, deeply buried feeling that to win is wrong. Mr Blair is a man entirely untouched by such feelings; he is a modern man with a modern mind, and such absurdities are not for him. But the absurdities are for someone, he may be sure, and they have already shown their faces.

True, the culture of defeat is mixed up in this case with something much more mundane, but much more dangerous for him. I have been collecting empty defeat-bottles for a long time now. Would you like to hear them rattle? Here goes:

A huge headline reads "Lay off the unions, warns Blunkett''; for those who don't know, Mr Blunkett is not a Tory Cabinet minister who is being warned to lay off, he is a stalwart of the unions. Better still (or do I mean worse?), Mr Monks, general secretary of the TUC, says that "the unions will not tolerate being marginalised under a Labour government''. Under a Labour government? That's what the gentleman said.

And how delicately and with what enormous charm did Mr Jinkinson, general secretary of Unison, question Mr Blair's veracity: "I don't know what the depth of Mr Blair's commitment to the national minimum wage is. I hope that what he said was sincere, that he meant it and that he will deliver.''

And with what pain, with what longing for a blunt instrument, with what yearning to leave all this business and become a Trappist monk (not to be confused with Mr John Monks) must Mr Blair face weekly, daily and hourly the demands from the comrades that he should give his unqualified support to the striking railwaymen (though psephologists have worked out that Jimmy Knapp loses on an average 17,834 votes an hour to the Tories, and that that figure would be at least twice as large if anybody could understand a word he says), and similarly face the clamour for the idea of a minimum wage, when he knows that such lunacy can do nothing but harm his chances of winning power.

And when it comes to the Hains and the Primarolos and Wedgwood Benns I cannot but believe that it is the love of losing that is here in play, particularly because it is the most blinkered of the Labour Left who are demanding the impossible; it is these in whose eyes that there gleam and tremble the signs of the Single Issue Fanatic. And I begin to be certain when I contemplate the social justice commission that the Labour Party is setting up; already, there are demands from some of the comrades that it be overruled "if it questions the need for universal benefits'', and still better for my thesis another group aren't even waiting for the commission to come into existence: they are "concerned to make clear that the views of the commission are not Labour Party policy''. (As for the Lib-Dems, I have never seen so passionate a prayer for failure as the one organised by those who voted for a minimum wage, pushed through the "cannabis is lovely'' motion and solemnly decided that the Queen should stay on the throne.)

Never mind; though Mr Blair will go bald with tearing out his hair in the frustrations put before his feet by his comrades, the knell has sounded and will not now be silenced. The Tory tide is going out, far and fast.

I have been astonished, for about as long as Major has been Prime Minister (some four years), to find that I am alone in saying that the next general election will not just be a win for Labour but a slaughter for the Tories. This is not just reading the record of the stink of lies and failure and cheating and incompetence; it goes deeper, and with every month deeper still. Ignore the pollsters and the past; the British people are sick of what is ruling them, and they will have them rule no more, until the Tories are cleansed by years of being out of office. And at last Labour has found a leader to win and to deserve to win. From now until polling day I am a Blairite, and then I shall give three thousand cheers as he enters 10 Downing Street.

Times Recommends

• Blair: My Years*
• Are we being too mean on the Blairs?
• Tony’s career in property