There is a Linda scholarship, bequeathed and received by the like-named. There is a Linda newsletter, a Linda mailing list of 1,500.The Lindas have a song. It topped the chart in 1948, and goes like this, in case you have forgotten:When I go to sleepI never count sheepI count all the charmsabout Linda.This was said to be written by Jack Laurence for a little girl named Linda Eastman, later McCartney, who is possibly the only famous vegetarian Linda in the world.The picture is bleak in politics, sport and Hollywood. There are advantages to such a do: no name tags and everyone is on first- name terms.Linda Pasvogle, of Fenton, Illinois, had the idea. Last weekend saw their ninth annual convention at the Hotel Savery, on Fourth and Locust in Des Moines. The Office of Population Censuses and Surveys confirms that Linda has been out of Britain's top 20 since the Sixties and out of the top 100 since the Seventies. But the Lindas of this world are uniting.

Linda means beautiful in Spanish but nobody seems to agree any more. "In the 1950s it was number one in America and the second most popular name in England and Wales. But since the 1970s it's dropped off the charts," says Linda Dusenbery of Des Moines, Iowa. If your name is Linda, then you have a problem: today, you are endangered; tomorrow, you may be extinct. But if he wins, his understanding of them will determine his success or failure in power..

Those are the dissenters' small things which Blair can ignore while he concentrates on winning. It is not a climate in which any reforming government can thrive.Without, in short, an injection of unpredictability, straight talking, real argument and courageous radicalism, our precious democracy is in danger of boring itself to death. And the party must achieve that revival of hope if it is to be successful not merely during one week in the spring of 1997, but for many months and years afterwards.Today, our politics are conducted in a sticky, conservative, energy-draining climate, in which the big issues (Europe, poverty, the environment) are not argued between the parties, and hence at the ballot box, but inside the parties; where frankness is shunned; where Westminster politics seems ever less part of the life of the rest of the nation. It means unlearning in office much of what you learned in opposition. It means rediscovering the qualities of people who had been irritating, and eagerly reaching for issues from which you had once shied away. It means courting danger and media unpopularity when necessary.But unless this transformation occurs, it will be difficult for a future Labour government to alter the climate of politics. The trick is to win power by ruthless concentration on the game of winning power; and then to be able to play a different sort of game.This switch has been achieved before.