Can Gordon unleash the radical within?

Making Labour once again a Party that cares about the poor and the underdog is no longer just the right thing to do; it's also the only way Labour politicians stand a chance of saving their Party and their hold on power.

Gordon Brown could do this. Somewhere inside him still lurks a radical reformer who cares about poverty and inequality. But Gordon kept him firmly locked up for 13 years, from 1994 to 2007, and now he's forgotten what he did with the key.

The reformer made a few tentative bids for freedom in Gordon's first weeks as Prime Minister. Remember early messages about limits to the privatisation of health and education, affordable housing, civil liberty, the cancellation of the Manchester supercasino?

Of course he was attacked by the Guardians of the Blairite flame, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn. But the polls went the Prime Minister's way.

And then, when he cancelled the general election, he withdrew inside his shell and - we are told - says now to his advisers: what is there for him to do but follow the Blairite agenda?

He is Prime Minister because the nation is sick of the Blairite agenda. Iraq, privatisation of public assets, attacks on civil liberties and the rest were not what the people wanted, and Labour knew Blair had to go.

The message of Thursday's elections couldn't be clearer. Ken Livingstone's vote was far better than that of most Labour candidate precisely because people think he has an Old Labour agenda. (The miracle isn't that Livingstone lost, but that he came so close to winning despite his Party.) In Barrow-in-Furness, four councillors were elected on the single platform of opposing academies. The messages couldn't be clearer. Everywhere where Labour candidates were identified with Labour's agenda of thre past decade, they were routed, because Labour's natural supporters - the radicals, the poor, the dispossessed - won't vote Labour any more.