All parties agree that ideology is dead. The word is as dirty to Tories battling out the leadership contest as it is to Tony Blair delivering a major speech on public services. And who is not pleased to hear it? But there is a downside.  Having no ideology means that all aspects of politics become more perplexing. Government is complicated to do and just as complicated to understand. The silver thread that linked and determined everything has gone.  When the defining mantra of the left said public good and private bad, and the right said roughly the opposite, politics was easy to make sense of. Now everything is messier.   While the practice of the trade has eventually had no alternative but to recognise this, public understanding has not caught up. It strives to cling to the old simplicities. The mindset of ideology survives the passing of the ideological age.  It's not merely in newspaper headlines, groping for the familiar matrix, that Blairism's plans for public service delivery are seen as a private sector takeover. I bet most people in the country see it that way too.   For this the government is largely to blame. In its first term, feeling its way forward, it wasn't straight. It wanted to please all the people all the time, so it tended to reassure the business world with one spin about innovation and competition, while distracting its own constituency with words that said nothing fundamental would change.  Its attitude to the health service covered a gamut of promises from tough to tender. Its replacement weapon for ideology was "what works". But this became its philosophy well before it knew what worked in either health or education.  It knew that what the Tories had done, especially in the NHS, did not work, but was far from sure how to replace it.   There remains a lot of confusion. Important differences are still not widely apprehended, partly because ministers' own schemes reflect the complication of post-ideological government, and partly because producer unions want to make things seem more threatening than they are. Enlisting private sector skills and money to develop surgical centres or improve failing schools is not the same as privatisation.   Very little of the public sector is capable of being run by the private sector in any case. Instituting regimes of competition or "contestability", a practice common in the public sectors of France, Germany, Holland and other continental models, isn't an assault on public service principles but a minimal necessity for raising them to the best practice levels everyone is entitled to expect.   Yesterday, Mr Blair got closer to clarifying some of this than he has done before. It was the most important speech he has made since the election.  Though the news line will be his commitment not to "flinch" from producer union opposition, the real message was a more cogent invitation than ever before to move out of the ideological box.  Some of the unions believe he is thirsting for a fight, even looking for a demonstration combat such as Mrs Thatcher had with the miners. Actually his words sounded as though they came from the last chance saloon of the British version of social democracy, which has rather suddenly woken up to the danger of its core proposition being seen to fail.   It was a sobering not a militant address. The case it made chimes with the experience of most people who use public services of every kind, which tells them that while more money is absolutely necessary, it is not necessarily sufficient, and that reform is essential if delivery is going to improve.  This was an inaugural moment for the second term in another way as well. It put into operation the vow of plodding, responsible realism with which Mr Blair said he would replace the ever deceptive spinning that was the leitmotif of 1997-2001. As such it sent three signals.   First, the government has no single plan for public services. There is no Great Blueprint, the temptation towards which it was lured in the first term. Compared with some of its first-term rhetoric, the glorification of the private has actually receded.  There are different answers for different problems. If more than half of local education authorities are described by Ofsted as either fairly or very successful, as they are, the sweeping abolition favoured by some reformers makes no sense.  It makes as little sense to insist that only NHS units may tender to run the new surgical centres just because they are being set up as a supplement to NHS hospitals.   A senior trade unionist told me yesterday he was sceptical of ministers' ability to get down to the detail of reform. They were, he said, more at home talking about, and endlessly revising, their fancy institutional structures than with the tedious practicalities.  He also regretted the adversarial - anti-union - subtext that seemed to have made its way into the discourse. But Mr Blair avoided that. His real subtext was that, at a time of peace and high employment, no task of government is in greater public demand than making essential public services, the base material of a functioning society, work properly.   Second, it is without doubt true that only a social democratic government has a chance of doing this.  Only the party with an incontestable belief in the primacy of public services can be trusted to reform their delivery in ways that do not merely profit private business and ultimately deprive the less advantaged members of society.  As a matter of fact, this belief may be a little more widespread than it was: another victory, perhaps, for a new spirit of the times.  Two of the candidates for the Tory party leadership make almost everything of their commitment to health and education, and admit that it was failure in this field that contributed most to the public's hatred of their party at the election.   But the third candidate might yet win. Iain Duncan Smith is the voice of the hard Tory right, which flirts with the minimal state, and much of which favours an American-style approach. With that line, Mr Duncan Smith would be even less likely than Michael Portillo or Kenneth Clarke to win the next election.  But the state of Conservatism makes plain the danger that without visible improvements brought about by progressive politicians the public sector will become the source of yet deeper cynicism and despair.   Third, though, the challenge is in one sense impossible to meet. Blair said yesterday that it was "as great as any that has faced a postwar government".  We have to be aware that he has staked everything on outcomes that will, in many people's eyes, never be satisfactory. The famous glass, whether in school or hospital, is always in danger of being half empty.  If the world economy, dragging Britain's with it, faces a prolonged downturn, not even the prudence of Mr Brown will have been enough to preserve the required budget surplus.   All one can say at the moment is that Mr Blair has set out, without glamour or spin, on the defining stage of his engagement with the realities the people most value.  Even that is worth saying, however - and worth supporting.