JUST how different new New Labour is from the old can be seen from the results of the Shadow Cabinet elections.

They were a triumph for Tony Blair's leadership.

He got all that he wanted - right down to the inclusion of Harriet Harman in his top team, even though, in the eyes of the party's old-style Left wing, she committed heresy by sending her son to a grammar school.

True, she scraped in at the bottom of the list.

And it is also true that MPs of the old Labour tendency withheld votes from others of the modernist Blairite persuasion - so that such as Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown and education and employment spokesmen suffered marked falls in the support they had had in the past.

But that's all the old guard dared muster - a mutter of protest.

There was no ammunition for the Tories, who maintain Labour has not changed its spots.

And there was little there either to alarm voters who do not like extremes.

But how has Tony Blair managed to work this change so easily?

The answer, it seems, is that now pragmatism prevails - at both leadership level and even on the Left.

See, for instance, how Blackburn's MP, Shadow Home Secretary Jack Straw, fared in this election.

He did not do badly - in fact, he got more votes than last time. And that is despite his upsetting the liberal Left with tough Tory-style talk of crackdowns on winos, "squeegee" merchants and troublesome youths.

It seems, then, that seeping down from the top to the Left of the Labour Party is the realisation that New Labour's drift to the Right is popular with the voters - just as the opinion polls say - and that, with long-lost power in sight, vigorous rocking of the boat would be madness.

In any case, at the helm, Tony Blair had the stabilisers out already.

The parliamentary party got the Shadow Cabinet elections they wanted, but on his terms.

Such was the short timescale, imposed by the leadership, that there was hardly time for any divisive shenanigans to get started.

In addition behind-the-scenes fixing had persuaded several potential contenders not to stand and some alleged arm-twisting over the proxy votes of absent MPs seems to have delivered the "right" result in the case of Ms Harman's inclusion in the top team.

But what irony there is in all of this for the Tories.

The public display of unity engineered by Tony Blair against the camouflaged backdrop of stage management and deals done behind closed doors is what the Conservatives were once so adept at.

Now, they have bloody leadership contests and highly visible splits - just like Old Labour.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.