Politician or professor? Brian Brivati talks to the principal of Mansfield College, about new Labour, the new right and his new job.

Two of Thatcher's underclass once sledge-hammered my front door. I was lying in the bath listening to an interview and reading a book. I leapt out and, with the voice from the tape as back-up, chased them away. All that stood between them and their goal was a naked PhD student, a cassette of David Marquand talking about social democracy and a copy of Marquand's The Unprincipled Society. Nearly ten years on, the author of the most interesting book produced by the British left in the 1980s has a new book out and is a month into a new job. The underclass is larger than ever.

There are two David Marquands. The politician who shifted allegiance from Labour to SDP to Lib Dem and back to Labour. This is the Marquand who sat as an MP, advised the European Community and has set up a think tank in a civic university. The other is an academic, until fairly recently professor of politics at Sheffield, who worries at the central problems of British political economy. They meet at the interface between practical politics and academic analysis, giving Marquand a restless quality.

But, talking to him in his new office as principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, there is both a sense of excitement and a certain calm. His practical side feels the responsibility of helping one of Oxford's newest colleges grow. "Ian Bancroft (a Mansfield trustee) took me to lunch in the House of Lords, and said: 'If you had become master of Balliol you would be like an admiral atop a battleship steaming along and there would be only a marginal difference you could make to the course. Here you are going to be the captain of a motor torpedo boat whizzing along the crest of a wave; you could steer it on to the rocks.'"

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The academic side of David Marquand has surfaced in his latest book, The Ideas that Have Shaped PostWar Britain (edited with Anthony Seldon), in articles in Political Quarterly, from which he has just stood down after ten years as co-editor, and in recent newspaper pieces. Marquand argues that the central question of The Unprincipled Society - where now for the left? - has begun to be answered by a combination of "stakeholding capitalism" (in which enterprises are managed through co-operation rather than competition), "moral collectivism", with its stress on family rather than personal values, and the focusing of debate on rebuilding a sense of community.

These ideas, coupled with the now acknowledged failure of Thatcher's new right project to roll back the welfare state and create an individualistic free-for-all, might, thinks Marquand, be coalescing into a new political paradigm. This is more than just Labour's big idea, this is the beginning of the political language of the 21st century.

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David Marquand likes the collegiate nature of Mansfield and the messy politics of Oxford. The way Oxford works chimes with the nature of the new politics he summed up at the end of The Unprincipled Society. "It rules out manipulative shortcuts to change, imposes 'reforms', technocratic fixes. Its style is humdrum not heroic: collegial not charismatic: consensual not ideological: conversational not declaratory. It depends on the slow processes of argument and negotiation. It requires patience, open-mindedness and humility before the astonishing and sometimes exasperating diversity of others."

Does Tony Blair measure up? Marquand is unsure: "I think he is open-minded. I think he is very intelligent, which is a good start. He strikes me as being confident in himself. And I think he is willing to listen, exceptionally so for a politician at that level. Gordon Brown is the same. They give the impression of being genuinely interested in teasing out the truth rather than in a quick fix in terms of tomorrow's speech."

I put it to Marquand that new Labour is well attuned to the project of winning power but not to the task which will face the next centre-left government. He rejects this. "Blair has a very acute sense of the difficulties of governing and that is part of the problem that he has. He is possibly excessively anxious to avoid what he sees as the mistakes of the 1960s. His reading of the 1960s is exaggerated expectations followed by deep disillusionment, which did enormous damage to the Labour party for a very long time. He feels this very strongly therefore he can't really say anything very tangible but he has got to say something. So what comes out is a lot of generalities without concrete backup. Part of the problem is that he has been in the position of the bright, young, charismatic leader for too long."

Despite this positive view of Blair and Brown, Marquand is still not sure about new Labour. He argues that the real test will come when they have held power and that the precursor to a political victory is a victory in the battle of ideas. There is an alternative to winning the battle of ideas and then winning the election - conceding defeat and going into the election on your opponent's ideological ground. Marquand sees such views as out of date. "We are at the end of the old paradigm. A very large number of people now think that things have gone adrift. They feel that society is too fragmented, too alienated, and something called social cohesion, needs to be addressed. That perception is enormously widespread. Now this is totally different from Labour having won the battle of ideas. Francis Fukuyama is an extraordinarily symptomatic figure from this point of view. First we get his book, The End of History that says liberal capitalism has won, and that's it. Then we get this very interesting book called Trust which says, well, actually, free-market capitalism can't work without social cohesion and how do we get social cohesion? Fukuyama does not know the answer, perhaps no one knows, but this is where the debate is now at. The articulation of the question is the beginning, is where we are at."

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Marquand's recent writing has almost tried to will us forward into the next phase, but in conversation he pulls back a little. "It is premature to talk of victory in the battle of ideas. If we are seriously interested in a new paradigm then it is not going to happen for a while because the thinking is still so fragmentary and exploratory and intellectuals have got to be allowed to change their minds and make mistakes. The politicians are focusing on what the politicians are always focusing on, something that can be related to the practical everyday problems of government. Intellectuals would be betraying their vocation if they behaved as the politicians want."

Marquand believes that one of the most disturbing features of the past 20 years is the collapse of what he calls "the public realm" - responsible citizenship expressed through local institutions such as local government or school governing bodies or voluntary organisations. Has the real structural change been in the psyche of individuals; was the new right, with its emphasis on self-interest, merely reflecting how people actually feel in the late 20th century? Marquand's optimism will not accept this. "Yes, this kind of change has happened and the new right was well placed to take advantage of the collapse of the public realm and of this deeper realm. The new right was the only thing around which seemed to make sense of the new world. But the new right turned out to be a disaster."

The problem with the current impasse, the period in which intellectuals and policy wonks try to work out the future, is that mistakes can be made. New Labour seems to be responding to the crisis in personal identity and the collapse of the family by advocating social engineering which borders on social authoritarianism. Will the next few years be difficult times in which to be different - to be gay, or a single parent or a surrogate mother? Marquand's optimism comes through yet again. "Harold Macmillan said if people want morality they should turn to their bishops. I think he was wrong. Blair also takes a different view. So did Gladstone. And I think Blair is right about this. If there is a public realm at all then part of the role of a political leader, as Teddy Roosevelt put it, is that 'the presidency is a bully pulpit', so is Number 10 Downing Street."

Moral collectivism connected to stakeholder capitalism and tied to the call for renewed social cohesion might be the political wave of the future and the new paradigm within which British politics will operate. The questions are being formulated, and some of the answers articulated, as David Marquand steers his torpedo boat of Mansfield College towards the millennium. His optimism is engaging, but the nagging doubt remains that this new paradigm accepts too many as permanently excluded from the benefits of trust and stakeholding: the underclass still seems to have few options apart from kicking in front doors.

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Brian Brivati, senior lecturer in modern British history, Kingston University.