As Toynbee says, "A bolder leader might challenge popular apathy, ignorance, indifference, unambition and intellectual idleness by offering something more than amelioration."
An attitude of caution perhaps more understandable from Bill Clinton who, for most of his time in office, had a hostile Congress arrayed against him, but less explicable for Blair who commanded an enormous majority and who has never seemed in doubt of winning another one.
I have watched this election from the home of my dying mother-in-law in Sweden, at peace that my vote won't count and knowing that, for the first time in my 40 years of voting, there is no party on offer I really want to vote for.
But Sweden sparks another thought as yet one more time family events lead me to observe close up how another nation runs its public services. How, for example, Swedish retirement homes and hospitals manage to maintain such high levels of medical excellence, the kindest of nursing care for the dying, coupled with very pleasant surroundings that would shame even the toppest notch of America's private sector.
I have long wondered why Blair doesn't hop on a plane for a 90-minute journey here, followed by the press pack, while he spends two weeks educating himself and the media behind him on what can work in the public sector, how it works and why it works. Blair could do anything he wants and get away with it. He could put Britain at the centre of Europe. He could challenge -- and change -- the British tolerance for the second-rate. He could give the country something to aim for and, as Toynbee says, "seize the imagination of a phlegmatic population [because] out there is still an outdated, unmodernized, semi-static nation, encrusted with phoney traditions, resistant to change, even in the face of glaring social and economic lassitude."
Good natured as he is, Blair is probably too young and too inexperienced to be prime minister. He came to office not having travelled much except on holiday, with few encounters with life outside his studies as a student and later as a parliamentarian. If he knew how Britain could be, he surely wouldn't be quite so complacent, unassuming and diffident about his country's future.
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