In the UK after nine years in office, the Labour Party is seeking a new source of energy to dispel the current mood of drift, and to provide a bounce when Tony Blair, UK prime minister, finally hands over to Gordon Brown, his chancellor. In the US, George W. Bush is struggling to revive his rapidly deflating second term administration. In France, Dominique de Villepin’s honeymoon turned out to be remarkably short and his administration now appears blocked and becalmed by protests and riots.

History suggests that governments rarely renew themselves while in office. Many come to power on a surge of reforming energy which then dissipates. Some become trapped by their own propaganda. Some are simply exhausted – like Britain’s Labour party in 1951. Some succumb to a torrent of sleaze, and end up viewed with contempt by the electorate – as happened to the Conservatives in 1997.

Many devices have been used to stave off stagnation, and the arrogant hubris that often seems to accelerate it. Sumerian kings had their faces slapped once a year by the high priest to remind them of the need for humility. In ancient Egypt, once pharaohs had been in power for 30 years they went through regular rituals in which they symbolically died and were reborn.

These days more prosaic tools have been used by ruling groups and parties to keep stagnation at bay. Mr Blair has constantly goaded his ministers and departments to sustain their reforming zeal and avoid complacency, and at the last election opted for what was called the “masochism strategy” – putting himself into situations where the public could vent its anger, a modern variant of Sumerian face-slapping.

Others have deliberately cultivated new leaders, or vigorous internal argument between competing think-tanks and factions. In countries such as the US, term limits on presidents provide one protection against stagnation, while Switzerland simply rotates its prime minister each year (and is judged by the World Bank to be the world’s best governed nation).

In the past, the most far-reaching renewals have depended on three essential conditions being in place. The first is a widely recognised set of new and compelling tasks. The second is a body of ideas about how to carry them out. The third is the political will to strike off in a new direction. When these come together governments often gain a renewed moral purpose. In Britain in 1906, for example, the Liberals won a decisive mandate to reform pensions and trade union laws to reflect Britain’s shift from an agrarian to an industrial society. In 1945, Labour won a mandate to build up the welfare state and create the National Health Service. In 1979, the Conservatives came to power with a vigorous programme to reverse British decline. In each case, renewal had a strongly moral tone, from the struggle against poverty and unemployment in 1945 to the restoration of Britain’s moral fibre in 1979. At other times, renewal was badly needed but did not happen.

In the 1930s, for example, Britain faced mass unemployment but was well-endowed with ideas about how to tackle it (from Keynes and others) – yet its leaders – Baldwin and Macdonald – lacked the wit or will to act and were simply too imprisoned by the flawed dogmas of the Treasury.

Not surprisingly, the next generation of actual or potential party leaders – David Cameron and Gordon Brown in the UK, Hillary Clinton and John McCain in the US, and Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royale in France – are now energetically testing the waters to find out which compelling tasks might define their prospective terms of office, and which ideas might give them an edge. It is already clear that the political language of the coming years is set to be very different from the 1990s.

So, alongside claims to economic competence, engagement with climate change has fast become a litmus test of political seriousness. Concern with flexibility is now accompanied with talk about well-being, and the many issues around work life balance, where politicians face the challenge of adapting laws and regulations to the vast shift of women into the workplace over the last few decades, a shift as momentous as that from the land to the cities in the 19th century, have become mainstream.

Whatever happens, any genuine renewal is bound to be rough. Smooth successions rarely help. Indeed, too much respect for the past can impede renewal. Junichiro Koizumi in Japan understood this when he renewed his own party, the Liberal Democrats, in part by running against it. Margaret Thatcher did the same to the British Conservatives, deliberately presenting herself as a break from the past. Mr Blair did little to hide just how differently he would lead the Labour party compared to his predecessors. Mr Cameron, too, has deliberately threatened his Conservative base as the price he has to pay for winning new converts.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge for Mr Brown. On the one hand he is a force for continuity, trusted by the public for his competence and integrity, and for his part in the government’s successes. Yet to thrive as a leader he will also need to present himself as fresh, as a break with the past. It is a delicate balancing act that many have flunked, including Paul Martin in Canada and Al Gore in the US, both of whom inherited strong political legacies but failed at the ballot box. Their failure was in part practical and political. But perhaps their biggest failing was that they did not give their parties, or their electorates, that sense of a compelling mission and moral purpose that marks out true leaders and truly transformational administrations.

Published in the Financial Times, May 2006.