In The Telegraph (UK)

I have so much to say about this. Practically nobody agrees with me on such things these days, but as a mission statement, "make Doctor Who like Doctor Who" seems eminently sensible. Keep it special.

Our purging of silliness from the show wasn't just political correctness. It made the stories much better. The Doctor's ''sonic screwdriver'', for example, was magical baggage we had to lose. A pen-sized gizmo that could blast through tempered steel, translate Azurian into English, and fend off the Karturi by generating an impenetrable neutron dome might be just the ticket in real life, but in fiction was a sure-fire story-killer. We didn't want our audience shouting out from behind the sofa ''where's the sonic screwdriver?'' whenever peril threatened.

We wanted a strong narrative line, and we relished the way our storylines could arc over four episodes, bristling with cliffhangers. All of which seems to be missing from the current season. Perhaps it's fear of a short audience attention span that has contracted the stories to single or double episodes. To compensate, we get snappy dialogue and a couple of cracking lead actors who do a lot of running around.

If a quarter of a century ago the first two laws of Doctor Who were ''Science'' and ``Story'', then the third was ''Keep It Special''. It might be a super sight gag, or a spooky spine tingle, but if it had shades of Benny Hill, or The Prisoner, out it went.

Every moment of meaningful change in modern British politics begins with the realisation that politics must act in service of the British people, rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s. A century ago, Clement Attlee wrote that Labour must be a party of duty and patriotism, not abstract theory. To build a “New Jerusalem” meant first casting off the mind-forged manacles. That lesson is as true today as it was then.

It is in this sense of public service that Labour has changed dramatically in the last three years. The course of shock therapy we gave our party had one purpose: to ensure that we were once again rooted in the priorities, the concerns and the dreams of ordinary British people. To put country before party.

None of that was easy but it was necessary. Often, it meant taking the path of most resistance. It meant not just listening to those who felt unable to vote for us but understanding them and acting. The public do not have outlandish or unreasonable expectations. They expect taxpayer money to be spent wisely, our security and our borders to be prioritised and a politics that serves them rather than itself. On each of these, we are now ready to deliver.