Sir Philip Gould, a key adviser to Tony Blair and one of the architects of the New Labour movement in the late 90’s, has died at the age of 61. He had been suffering from cancer and passed away at the Royal Marsden Hospital.
Having made his name in advertising, Gould worked with Labour in every general election from 1987 to 2005. After the first two, failed, campaigns he became part of the push by Tony Blair to modernise the party and make it more electable. He documented this period in The Unfinished Revolution: How New Labour Changed British Politics Forever, his only book.
Gould is seen as having helped Labour to arguably its greatest political highs in many decades. Never before had the party won three consecutive elections, and while the Blair premiership perhaps did not end as successfully as its architects had hoped, the subsequent miserable failure of the Brown government shows that Gould’s influence was missed in the later years.
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