He has at his right hand Archie Norman MP the man who single-handedly took the Asda chain from whatever

He has at his right hand Archie Norman MP, the man who single-handedly took the Asda chain from whatever it was, to whatever it is now (I apologise for the imprecision; I am not a City expert). And on his left he has the consultancy firm, McKinseys (company motto: once in, never out).Together they have decided to call together all 164 of the party's MPs - its middle management, if you like - for a weekend at a country hotel. Dress will be informal, meaning slacks, nasty shirts and the occasional pair of moccasins. He has sunk into the obscurity that any leader of the current Conservative Party would The world does not care what he thinks or what he does. So Mr Hague - once a management consultant - has decided that if his party is to amount to anything, it must modernise, restructure, redefine and communicate (MRRC). When shown photographs of the affable Conservative leader, voters often identify the bald head and even features in the snap, with Niles from the TV comedy show Frasier, or (less flatteringly) Homer Simpson.

Strangely, Mr Hague is less well known now than a year ago when he was secretary of state for Wales; in fact the evidence indicates that fewer people every day know who he is. At the current rate of forgetting, Mr Hague has about six months before he wakes up, looks in the mirror and mutters something about the face being familiar, but the name entirely escaping him. This is, of course, no comment on Mr Hague's talents or personality. That Labour party was for one century only - due to assume the status of an also-ran as the millennium passes. As Johnson points out in his never-to-be-published Fabian pamphlet, union leaders who aren't uneasily shackled to the government of the day are not merely freer to use their union political funds "for their own campaigns and activities" - they are also freer to speak their minds. The issue isn't really whether Blair's Labour Party will get rid of the unions; it's that the unions ought to be getting rid of Labour.. No one in Britain, apparently, recognises William Hague. It's no good invoking the fact that the unions invented the Labour Party - which they did.

But that has little to do with union influence in the Labour Party. No other trade union movement in a modern industrialised economy has seats on the policy-making bodies of a party. Yet the AFL- CIO - the American TUC - which historically forswore political affiliation, still decided to give $60m to the second Clinton campaign. Similarly, with the unions and their leaders; provided that they do not seek to use their block vote, or their seats on the national executive, or their clout in the National Policy Forum to recreate the polity of the Seventies, Blair will be relaxed. If they do seek to use party muscle to pursue vested interests, they will find Blair alarmingly unsentimental about preserving the links.Healthy unions are a symbol of a free society. It's a fairly safe bet that societies that don't have them, like societies which don't allow a free press, are not the kind of societies that most of its citizens want to live in. It's like the question of whether Blair will opt for PR in the Commons.