Tony Blair was a smooth old manipulator of people’s brains. He took a crazy, unelectable party of beardy weirdies and made them electable by promising that they’d changed, that the days of epic splurge and leaving the economy on the brink of bankruptcy were over. They even got rid of the beards. Labour was dead: Long live New Labour.

And the outcome? After 13 years it turns out they did go on an epic spending splurge and they have left the country on the brink of bankruptcy. The grumpy, miserable old Tories were right, and the ageing peace loving hippies that told me that the last Labour Government was a paragon of peace, love and socialism were spectacularly wrong.

The change for Labour was superficial while the real substance hadn’t changed at all. Their failure, and the country’s failure, is this toxic inability to put the two things – epic splurge and brink of bankruptcy – together, to realise that the same action will produce the same reaction every single time.

So is it any wonder that ‘Heir to Blair’ Cameron struggled to persuade everyone that his party had really changed? Haven’t we been here before? Isn’t the lesson of New Labour that parties find it much easier to say they’ve changed than they do to actually change?

Cameron, I’m certain, understands that the decontamination strategy has failed – and that he’s now got 5 years to give people an experience of Tories in power that replaces the legends and myths surrounding the last Tory Government. Was it true that in 1997 things could only get better, that Britain really was at its lowest possible moment? I don’t think so.

That’s why this Coalition shouldn’t have come as a surprise, in hindsight. There’s an inevitability about it. He’s decontaminated the Tories just enough to get into Number 10, but not enough to override the fear and visceral hatred that exists for the Tories outside of the South of England.

But like Thatcher, Cameron has inherited a toxic financial situation with no change in the attitudes that once someone is working in the public sector that’s got to be a job for life “or else”.

So things are going to get ugly. In what will probably prove to be a portent of things to come, I recall that last year, in Leeds, Unite members agitated against a Tory/Liberal coalition running the council there, forcing the people to endure a bin strike that lasted months.

No matter how many times we go through this cycle of bringing the country to its knees, then leaving some other poor sod to clean up the mess, we still blame that poor sod. Whether the Coalition helps that remains to be seen. The hope, I assume, is that by being ‘nice’ they keep the support of the public.

But, for some reason, I’m left pondering a quote from Pulp Fiction. It’s from when Jules is talking about why he won’t eat pork (“don’t eat nothing that don’t have sense enough to disregard it’s own faeces”). He’s asked if he’d eat pork if a pig had a better personality:

“It’d have to be one charming mother fucking pig”

Quite.