Mrs Margaret Thatcher is said to have replied, when asked about her greatest legacy: "New Labour". Whether the quotation is apocryphal or not, it is certainly apposite, as the Conservative Party - gathered in Bournemouth this week for its annual conference - has good reason to lament.
For Mr Tony Blair's Labour Party has firmly occupied the hearts and minds of middle England by accepting much of what she preached. The Conservatives have been displaced from that position and forced to become more extreme in their appeal. As a result, almost no-one now expects Labour to lose next year's election, while the Tories still struggle to define their identity in such a way as to recapture the centre ground of British politics.
The Conservative leader, Mr Michael Howard, reflected this dilemma in his keynote conference speech yesterday. It concentrated on a few critical themes: diminished trust in New Labour and Mr Blair's policies on Iraq; detailed plans on crime, prisons and punishment; restrictions on immigration; no false promises on taxation; and undertakings to renegotiate Britain's relationship with the European Union and to repatriate powers from Brussels. It sounded more like a plan for his party to win the election after next rather than the one next year.
Mr Howard had sensible things to say on trust. If there is another war, he asked, would voters believe Mr Blair after being so misled on intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
Nevertheless, the Tory position of support for the war means they are unlikely to make much headway into Labour's vote in this respect. Critics are more likely to gravitate towards the Liberal Democrats on that issue. Mr Howard has to worry more about the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which demands British withdrawal from the EU rather than renegotiating membership terms, as he demands. The Conservatives were humiliated into fourth place behind the UKIP at the Hartlepool by-election last week.
Mr Howard's trouble is that his party's core supporters no longer coincide with the centre ground of British politics. Through a deft combination of New Labour's egalitarianism, Mrs Thatcher's policies on privatisation and individualism, Harold Macmillan's one-nation conservatism and his own moral evangelism, Mr Blair has reconfigured Britain's party divisions and their electoral appeal. This is clearly reflected in media coverage of the respective party conferences. Mr Howard faces the unenviable task of retrieving his party's legacy and repositioning it in the centre ground of British politics.