Apart from a feeble joke about foxes and the distracted, almost embarrassed, expression on his face during some of the mawkish moments, there were only two things wrong with Tony Blair's millennial speech in Bournemouth this week. It was dishonest and stupid.

Dishonesty is unfortunately taken for granted as an occupational hazard in politics, so I will begin with my more surprising accusation. Mr Blair has become the most popular Prime Minister in peacetime history by running a generally very successful Government and persuading tens of millions of people to admire him, believe in his policies and follow his lead. How, then, can a mere scribbler, who has never achieved anything of consequence, accuse him of being stupid? This is a fair question, and as you will see if you read on, I will conditionally withdraw my insult when I come to question the sincerity of Mr Blair's speech. But let us suspend disbelief for a moment and assume that the Prime Minister really meant what he said.

Let us assume that he really meant to divide Britain into two nations - on one side "the forces of modernity who have courage to change, those who have confidence in the future"; and on the other, the dark, ageing "forces of conservatism" who have "stunted the people's potential", denied education and democracy to ordinary people and were even apparently responsible for the murder of Martin Luther King.

If we assume that Mr Blair really believes in this Manichaean duality between respect for the past and preparation for the future, then it becomes just about possible to understand the blood-curdling belligerence of his speech and its bizarre Messianic peroration about "national salvation". But if that is really the way he thinks, then serious questions must surely arise about his sanity.

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

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Did the British live in a state of benighted slavery in the thousand years until May 1, 1997? Does Mr Blair really think, to put it all in a nutshell, that just because he enjoys a two-to-one opinion poll lead over William Hague, he is entitled to call himself "the nation's only hope of salvation"?

No, if Mr Blair believed half of what he said on Tuesday, he would be stark mad, which he obviously is not. Why, then, did he launch this crusade? Mr Blair is presumably trying to convert the widespread (and well deserved) contempt for the present generation of Tory leaders into a generalised distaste for everything the Conservative Party has ever done and, beyond that, for conservatism with a small "c" and even tradition. From doing that, it may be just a small step to Mr Blair's ultimate political prize - to win enduring loyalty from voters by subliminally identifying new Labour with modern virtue and the "conservative" opposition with every characteristic that the British people have been trained to despise.

This is the point where Mr Blair's intelligence needs to be questioned. Voters are not so stupid as to believe that William Hague stands comparison with Churchill, Disraeli and Wellington; they will not deny their grudging admiration for Margaret Thatcher just because they titter at Ann Widdecombe. The British people are even less likely to be taken in by the second part of Mr Blair's rhetorical trick. They will not forget their respect for tradition, their sense of history and - yes - their natural conservatism, even if the political party that calls itself "Conservative" turns out to be in terminal decline.

Britain may be more willing to embrace change today than it was in the 1950s, but there is no evidence that people positively welcome change for its own sake, still less that they long for the "radical" modernisation Mr Blair now demands. Radicalism is often necessary to achieve some economic or social objectives, but outside of rare revolutionary moments such as France in 1789, or Russia in 1917, radical change will never be

popular as an end in itself.

Even "modernisation" is a double-edged slogan. Britain's radical modernisers of previous generations created the National Health Service, but they also produced - and

with equally laudable, idealistic motives - tower blocks, Concorde, British Leyland and 98 per cent tax.

The public reaction against radicalism is, in fact, one of the main reasons for the unassailable political position Mr Blair enjoys today. The Tories under Mrs Thatcher ceased to be conservatives and turned into Maoist radicals, believers in permanent revolution for its own sake. For a while Britain accepted the revolution of Thatcherite market fundamentalism as the necessary condition for economic revival. But, as the economy finally began to recover after the revolution, few people had the stomach for another dose of radicalism under John Major.

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