Tell me you love me. Tell me you really love me. Get up on tippy toes and kiss me and tell me I am gorgeous and clever and popular and that you will love me for ever and to bits. Go on. Do it, everyone. Please.

Okay, Mr Blair, it's all right. We do love you. Now, as we were saying before this unedifying constitutional outburst ...

Yet history will not write off yesterday's Labour triumph as merely predictable. History would suggest that it was by no means predictable. Four years ago, it seemed probable that the Tories would at least contrive to reassemble their 1992 level of support and give an incumbent Labour Government a run for its money. Their failure must in part be attributed to the immaturity of William Hague's otherwise plucky leadership, but that cannot be the whole story.

Labour's 2001 victory is the climactic event of the revolution instigated by Margaret Thatcher in 1975. This revolution, against the postwar political order, is coming to seem of Cromwellian dimensions. It was first realised in the late-1980s and was carried forward by Margaret Thatcher's ideological apostles, John Major and Tony Blair, in the 1990s. Its first impact was on attitudes towards the role of government and organised labour and capital. Its next was on Britain's industrial structure. But the most dramatic impact was on the British Labour Party. It wiped that party from the map and replaced it with some strange gene-pool labelled "Thatcherite Labour".

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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• The past decade a disaster?

• All about Iraq? Don’t you believe it

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

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The Blair-Brown project "to make Labour electable" has been a phenomenon. Scan the political horizon from macro-economics to social security, crime and punishment, privatisation, foreign intervention or planning control and you will not find a modern government as "right-wing" as Mr Blair's. Never was an election poster more ironic than that depicting William Hague in a Thatcher wig. Mr Blair wears that wig, and should wear it proudly.

So what will he do with his victory? I sense that he has no more idea than the rest of us. No Prime Minister is said to be sure of his (or her) hold on power until confirmed for a second term. Unlike Mrs Thatcher, Mr Blair has no ideological ambition beyond a vague desire to help his friends and make the world a better place. He has received his second kiss but does not know where to put it, on his portrait or in his pocket.

Commentators always yearn for governments to be more radical and governments resist. But the start of a second term with a secure majority is the one moment when Prime Ministers cannot plead caution. Two years from now, things might change. The Tories might revive. The economy might be in recession and the euro a mess. Now and now alone is the time to do the once undoable, to honour the radicalism which Mr Blair left unfulfilled in his first term.

There is no doubt of the message that emerged strongest from the campaign. The economy or taxes are no longer controversial. Top issue has been the state of public services, which are poor, both absolutely and by international standards. The fault does not lie in money. Vast sums have been devoted to the welfare state by governments of both parties. The failure is systemic. These services are demoralised and badly led.

Urban schools are dreadful. Prisons are a national disgrace. The public has lost confidence in the police. Hospitals are driving the desperate as well as the rich to seek private care. The railways are a shambles. For a rich country with a secure government, Britain's public services are indefensible.

In one of his more gnomic speeches, Mr Blair in 1999 attacked "forces of conservatism", undefined but taken as an attack on the Tories. Mr Blair need not fear the Tories and is an older and a wiser man. He must by now have identified conservative forces closer to home. They are uncannily similar to those that confronted his mentor, Mrs Thatcher, after her victory in 1983. They are occupational interest groups exploiting monopoly power.

Very soon in the new Parliament, Mr Blair will find himself face to face with three of these groups, the police, the doctors and the teachers. Police conditions of service are protected by one of Britain's most powerful unions, the Police Federation. Police forces are becoming ungovernable. Overtime, "sickness" pensions, red tape and the compensation culture are keeping the police trapped in offices and cars, where the public do not want them. Britain is becoming an increasingly "unpoliced state", irrespective of money or police numbers. The Police Federation will be Mr Blair's miners' union, or should be.

The same institutional conservatism confronts him in the health service. The NHS used to be simple, local, popular and not very efficient. It has become complex, national, unpopular, and not very efficient. The number of patients going private has risen by three times in four years, a vote of chronic no-confidence. As with crime, the relentless juggling of statistics cannot mask huge public dissatisfaction.

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