Tony Blair ran the Labour Party and the Labour government on the same principle as Basil Fawlty on Gourmet Night: insult and abuse Labour’s regulars and long-stay residents in the hope of attracting a better class of clientele.

Like Basil, he expected trade unions and party members to pay their bills uncomplainingly and hide in their rooms, leaving him free to seek votes and money from people with no previous interest in the Labour Party. He exulted in confronting Labour’s traditional supporters, and an important test of any proposal was whether it would upset them.

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, it looked for a short time as though things would be different. But now it is clear that we are in for a new series of the long-running sitcom: Fawlty Powers.

After years in a loveless marriage, Sybil has finally ejected Basil and taken over Labour’s hotel. There are some changes in the supporting cast. Alistair Darling takes over the role of Manuel from John Prescott.  He does not get his words in such a tangle. But he is still entrusted only with menial tasks and is regularly browbeaten by the Fawlty in charge. Harriet Harman takes over the role of Polly the chambermaid, decorative and emollient but with no influence on the plot.Despite the nominal change of management the service and the menu are the same. All the policies, and worse, all the assumptions, which dismayed Labour’s regulars about Tony Blair’s government are still in place under Gordon Brown.

The same schoolboy crush on Big Business. The same terror of Right-Wing media.

Widening inequality. Trade unions sidelined. Thousands of workers on poverty wages, exploited and unprotected, working in rotten conditions with no prospect of advance. Child poverty rising again. Families drowning in debt. Taxation a voluntary act for the super-rich and giant multinational companies and a bigger burden for everyone else. Pensions in crisis: more and more people working longer and longer for less and less money in retirement.

The creeping commercialization of the NHS and other essential public services. Hospitals, schools and other essential public assets mortgaged for generations to private companies through expensive PFI/PPP deals. The NHS piled high with meaningless targets and forced to doctor figures instead of patients. Public servants everywhere battered with directives, endlessly reorganized and saddled with botched IT schemes.

English education more fragmented and socially divisive than ever, with pockets of privilege for pushy parents and second-class standards for everyone else. More and more schools turned into playthings of businessmen or faith groups. Schools full of exhausted teachers and bored pupils, over-tested and under-stretched. Bullying and truancy at record levels. University graduates unable to work and pay back their debts.

More people than ever living in fear of crime – even though crime figures have fallen. Squalid prisons filled to bursting point with people who should not be there, including record numbers of women and children. Detention without trial, and non-stop attacks on civil liberties. More and more personal data collected by government (and regularly lost): ID cards on the way.

Crowded, chaotic, costly public transport. Constant fare increases above the rate of inflation.

More nuclear power. More nuclear weapons.

Continued participation in the Iraq war, joined by another unprofitable war in Afghanistan. The British army brought to breaking point – thousands of under-protected soldiers scattered too thinly in huge territories full of armed people who hate them. The same supine relationship with the Bush administration.

All of these legacies from Basil are still in place. They repel Labour regulars without appealing to anyone else, apart from the small number of people who make money from them. And now Sybil has done more to depress the regulars –  appeasing the Saudis and the Chinese, closing post offices, the 10p tax fiasco, 42-day detention, stuffing Britain’s bulimic banks with money while urging restraint on everyone else. Sybil is less hysterical and confrontational than Basil and there is more muddle now than melodrama. But the effect is the same – people are leaving Labour’s hotel in droves. The new guests have lost faith in its management and service, the old guests have lost faith in its heart.

The Basil Fawlty theory of wooing new customers by driving out your old ones was never a good way to run a hotel or a government. It was successful for a time only because voters had nowhere else to stay – only a decayed, old-fashioned Tory hotel or a small, boutique Lib Dem one. But now the Fawlty Labour hotel has serious competitors. The Tory hotel has had a major refurbishment and acquired a personable receptionist in David Cameron. The Lib Dem hotel is trying to do the same with Nick Clegg. In Scotland and Wales voters are turning to hotels under local managers. And everywhere, more and more voters are deciding not to go to anyone’s hotel and stay at home instead.

When any hotel loses its most loyal customers it is in real trouble. It not only loses their repeat business but it loses the people who recommend the hotel to their family and friends. Labour’s recovery has to begin with its old customers. But to get them back again, it will not be enough to change the cast of Fawlty Powers. Labour will have to change the script.