The fourth way

New Labour has reached a crisis moment. The prime minister has led the country into its worst foreign-policy mistake since Suez. He has no exit strategy from an expensive and dangerous quagmire and in passing has wrecked his own European strategy. The episode has accelerated the political disintegration that was already besetting the government. The coalition that was brilliantly assembled in the mid-1990s – from moderate trade unionists to pro-European businessmen-is fracturing amid widespread disillusion at the government’s incapacity to move the country on from the status quo it inherited in 1997 – Euroscepticism and an uncritical commitment to the…