But now he's talking about "industrial activism", which sounds distinctly Old Labour.
Bringing in a few distinctly New Labour figures is a necessary part of building a big tent, but it would be even more important to build more solid support in the party's centre-left mainstream.
Nor, indeed, that he had any pretensions about anything: he couldn't stand pretentiousness, reserving his particular scorn for the political classes, seen from a distinctly old Labour point of view.
Mr Brown, they say, is happy with both the distinctly New Labour manifesto and the departmental five-year plans that preceded it.The second assumption is that Mr Brown is reconciled to allowing Mr Blair to carry on for another three years, should he wish to do so, without staging a repeat of the kind of power play that he and his followers mounted about a year ago.
There may be moments when you're dancing – in the mud, to an obscure post-grunge rock band with a man who looks distinctly like the Labour politician Tom Watson – when you begin to believe that festivals come together by magic.
Mothers with prior experience of normal pregnancies report distinctly delayed onset of labour and reduced fetal activity during the pregnancies involving Prader-Willi children.
"Good news for the jobless is being offset by ever slimmer pickings for those already in work, giving the UK labour market a distinctly bittersweet flavour," he said.
New Labour was a distinctly odd hybrid, fashioned by people with an ideological past for an age where few cared about the details of politics as long as they could spend.
Anthony Giddens, one of the architects of Mr. Blair's centrist "third way" philosophy, argues that, while "Labour's record is distinctly patchy," the government had impact.
The position of Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour opposition, who led a distinctly uninspiring effort to win the Party's supporters over to the Remain cause, is also in doubt.
