THE BLAIR EFFECT is a collection of authoritative and (reasonably) unpartisan commentaries on the first administration of Tony Blair as it approaches a General Election. The authors demonstrate that it is possible to write contemporary history about even the most recent past in an accessible yet scrupulously objective manner. How much has changed since the landslide election victory of May 1997? What was prompting the changes, and to what extent were they the fruit of number 10's intentions? How far might they have happened anyway? How effective has the Blair effect been? Peter Riddell, Vernon Bogdanor, Dennis Kavanagh and a host of other star analysts pose these questions and do their best to answer them.