"My generation," the Prime Minister told Roy Hattersley in his Observer interview earlier this month, "longed for a Labour Party in which people who are successful felt at home. For years it was perceived as anti-aspirational. Indeed, it was anti-aspirational. If you wanted to get on in life you had to be a Tory. Indeed, if you wanted to own your own house you had to be a Tory."

These must qualify among the great unknown laws of past politics. Only Conservatives could own their own homes; Old Labour wanted everyone to fail; successful people were not welcome here. Remind me exactly what Labour Party Tony Blair was observing when he came to such conclusions on behalf of his contemporaries? Presumably not the one which neglected to expel Arthur Scargill for all those years when he saw no contradiction between his particular brand of militant socialism and owning a nice place in which to live.

When he isn't mouthing platitudes, Tony Blair has increasingly taken to rewriting history, principally Labour Party history. I mentioned in my last column here how he had described the Labour Party of James Callaghan, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock as having been "hijacked" by a "small group of utterly unrepresentative people". Now he seems determined to insist that, prior to his accession, the party had done its damnedest to avoid the stigma of success in any area. "The single most important way that we will get more money is to run a steady economy," he told Roy Hattersley -- which is not only "blindingly obvious", as Hattersley pointed out, but also suggests that previous Labour governments somehow thought (and behaved) otherwise.

Still, he's changed all that now. "My generation feels totally at home with a Labour Party which wants to encourage success," he informed Hattersley. Poor old Roy, 20 years Blair's senior, was so het up about this repeated emphasis on the generational thing that he missed the more obvious point that the Labour Party -- indeed any party -- has always wanted to encourage success: the stuff of politics is the debate about how you achieve it and who benefits.

Tony Blair has touted his "Third Way" view of politics as part of a dismissal of "the narrow ideological prescription to do with class". But when he says that "My generation longed for a Labour Party in which people who are successful felt at home", he is actually speaking not on behalf of a generation but a social class. What he is talking about is a group of people who want to feel comfortable not about their success but their prosperity. It didn't feel good doing so well during the Thatcher years when so many others were doing badly; Tony Blair's "generation" (for which, read social peer group) wanted to feel good as well as getting rich.

Above all, they wanted to do so without pain or sacrifice. They wanted to feel like the Good Samaritan, but without having to go to the trouble of crossing the road to do so. They didn't want to feel bad about buying a privileged education for their own children while other people's children's schools were crumbling. They didn't want to have to lie to their friends about voting Labour when secretly they were among those undeclared Tories who distorted every opinion poll. But as much as they wanted a better, fairer society in theory, they really didn't want to have to pay for it.

Then along came the political conjuring trick made possible by the dampening of expectations since the 1992 election defeat and the economic growth bequeathed by Kenneth Clarke and John Major. (Let's be honest here: our admiration for Gordon Brown as Chancellor may know no bounds, but the fiscal surplus accumulating in the Treasury's coffers has little to do with anything he's done in the 12 months since taking office.) Tony Blair could deliver the social feelgood factor without requiring those who have done so well out of two decades of Thatcherism to do a little less well during the coming decade of New Labourism.

It is, of course, an illusion. Someone, somewhere will always have to pay, as Tony Blair himself makes clear (with a somewhat different emphasis) when he talks of "hard choices". The question is: who? When Roy Hattersley challenged him to nominate one hard choice that had hit the rich -- or Tony Blair's "generation", perhaps -- the best he could come up with was "bunging up petrol taxes which affects everyone who drives a car". Hardly a wealth tax, is it?

The new think tank, Catalyst, was launched with Hattersley as chairman (and yours truly as one of its pamphleteers) last week. Its commitment to the redistribution of power, wealth and opportunity went down like a cup of cold sick among what the Prime Minister likes to think of as his generation. "Aren't you just going to be dismissed as critics of the government?" the Guardian's political editor, Michael White, asked Roy Hattersley at the launch. "Since when has being a critic of the government been cause for being dismissed?" Hattersley responded. It's encouraging to know that when Tony Blair is talking about his generation, there are some people who won't let the old commitments to equality and fairness just fade away.