Bernard Crick once called Giddens’s The Third Way ‘a book of well-meaning abstract generalities curiously or cautiously avoiding any inferences to policy’, and described those who searched for this mythical pathway as ‘people too busy to think or too prudent to commit themselves to anything specific’.¹

The third way (let’s abandon the grandiose initial caps) seems to have fallen out of Labour discourse now. Did it expire as Tony Blair marched into the sunset, or did it merely mutate, to live on in later incarnations of Labour as a kind of political retrovirus? If the third way proper died with St Tone, then perhaps Gordo’s tenure was the fourth way, and Ed’s post-2010 party may have been the fifth, or the fifth shading into the sixth.

To put it another way, if the way of the way is still living deep within Labour, are we still languishing under a version of the original third way, that sociologist’s conceit, or have we now moved on to some kind of progeny – to way no. 6, or even as far as way no. 7?

With luck, the fact that even the Blairites aren’t talking about the third way means that it has gone for good and died without progeny. And we can hope that it has taken the predetermining caricatures of the first and second ways with it.