It's a dirty secret: no party has the answer to a state in chaos

By Michael Portillo (THE TIMES, 14/05/06):

After weeks of paralysis at the end of last week the British government was seen to twitch. The prime minister and the chancellor have managed to agree on a policy. The Treasury leaked the news that Gordon Brown had “won” against Tony Blair so that the basic state pension will be raised in line with earnings rather than prices from 2012.

More neutral observers might say that Blair had carried the principle of that linkage and Brown had merely pushed back the start date by two years. Perhaps he hopes that by then nobody will remember Blair, let alone credit him with improving pensioners’ fortunes. The new policy should take effect as Brown prepares for his second election as prime minister.

As is traditional with major policy announcements that will affect the lives of millions of citizens for decades to come, this one was slipped out as an unattributable but partisan briefing by Brown supporters. The chancellor had made frequent television appearances in the previous days, but naturally he reserved his air time for the more important matter of hounding Blair out of office.

Brown cannot be lured in front of a camera when government policy on Iraq or the release of foreign prisoners needs to be defended. But following Blair’s death-wish cabinet reshuffle the chancellor genially toured the studios to tell us of the need for renewal and a smooth transition to a new prime minister.

Good-naturedly he reminded us that Margaret Thatcher, who did not take the hint to leave office voluntarily, was driven out of Downing Street (literally and metaphorically) a tearful and crumpled wreck.

Never before had Brown been so overtly menacing. His thinly veiled threat had to be taken seriously because hostility to Blair on the back benches had reached a new high water mark. Former ministers queued to urge him to announce a timetable for the handover (code for “quit soon”). As Blair was pummelled by David Cameron at prime minister’s questions Labour MPs enjoyed the spectacle in silence. In the Commons no sound is more deadly.

No sitting Labour prime minister has been deposed by his party. But the past is no guide to the future. Nor is the cumbersome process required to force a leadership contest a sufficient protection for Blair. If enough members of his party declare that they have no confidence in his leadership, his position will become impossible. After nine years of general docility, the wimps are stirring. The once disciplined Labour party now cares more about settling scores than about its public image. Doing each other in will soon matter more to its MPs than being in government.

Brown still craves office, of course, and he will pay a price for that ill-disguised lust. One reason for his party’s prolonged success is that voters once believed that Labour politicians were in public life not for themselves but to make life better for other people. As the party turns in on itself, the voters feel excluded. It is difficult now to believe that Brown yearns for social justice more than he hungers for power.

Watching Blair last week two contrasting visions came to mind. One is that festive balloon you find wedged behind the sofa weeks after Christmas. Half the air has gone. The rubber skin is obscenely wrinkled and the once bright colour is dulled and patchy. The prime minister is almost audibly leaking authority and deflating before our eyes.

More flatteringly, Blair in the Commons conjured the image of a stag at bay. This magnificent political creature was for years monarch of all he surveyed. The antlers are broken, the coat no longer lustrous, but even as the hounds yap excitedly around him, he retains a certain hauteur.

My wistfulness over the departure of this admired once-in-a-generation politician mingles with my ecstatic schadenfreude at his demise.

As Hamlet says of his late father, “Take him for all in all I shall not look upon his like again.” Blair’s political achievement in resurrecting the Labour party and winning three massive election victories is prodigious. No politician since the second world war — including Thatcher — so embodied the hopes of the nation. None enjoyed a broader range of support. Confronted with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales or the bitter divisions of Northern Ireland he displayed a golden touch. That flair had not left him even last summer when he superbly represented Britain’s stoic response to terrorism.

But a man who trades on his virtue, which he believes to be self-evident, deserves to be crushed. The penalty for hubris was set long ago. When Blair so liberally accused the last Tory government of sleaze he chose his own lingering political death. To see him now sucked into a suffocating bog of his own sleaze is enough to make the heart leap for joy.

As Blair continued to defy his fate last week, he upbraided Cameron for lacking policies. Coming from a leader whose administration was deadlocked by internal conflict it was a typically breathtaking accusation. Even so, Blair knows that the charge hits home. Tories and would-be Tory supporters fret about what the party would do in office.

However, that accusing arrow could equally be aimed at Brown. In all that time on our television screens, no hint of policy escaped his lips. His generalisations were as vague and broad as Cameron’s. Brown is impatient for power, but what he wishes to do with it is a mystery.

There is plenty to do. Every day brings fresh examples of a British state in chaos. The number of dangerous foreign prisoners released rather than deported rises constantly. Violent Britons are freed into the custody of the probation service which does not prevent them committing murder. Afghan hijackers remain in Britain years after they pirated their way here. One of the 7/7 bombers was under MI5 surveillance but even so the plot was not thwarted.

The National Health Service is plagued by superbugs and deficits. The system of child support payments has collapsed and the subsidies to farmers are in such chaos that Margaret Beckett, the minister responsible, has been promoted to the Foreign Office, perhaps on compassionate leave.

This government has made Britain more ungovernable by adding enormous numbers of public servants. It is comic to see this authoritarian government tripped up almost daily by the human rights legislation that it passed with such a fanfare. But the malaise is deep and has been longer than nine years in the making.

The bungling incompetence of our public services has been a fact of life for decades. Thatcher, that supposed revolutionary reformer, changed the things that are still in the control of central government: tax rates, tax systems, public ownership, laws on trade unions and foreign policy. But she left institutional reform in health, education, prisons and immigration largely untouched. Perhaps that is why she lasted longer in office than Blair will.

The agreement reached between Blair and Brown on pensions is for a Thatcher-style reform. The government has the competence to set the rate of pension and the pension age. It is as simple as pulling a lever and the lever works. But Blair has wasted his time in office because he thought that organisational change was administratively as straightforward as adjusting the pension rate. It is not. In dealing with the Home Office, for example, the levers of power have simply broken off in his hand. He has no talent for managing such complex change, nor indeed has any other politician.

In any case, it is unfair to accuse Cameron of having no policies. On health and education he supports the prime minister. That is not surprising since Blair has travelled in a circle and is now legislating changes that more or less reinstate the systems that he inherited from John Major and abolished early in office.

Such reforms are superficial and probably ineffective. Whether we have Major’s trust hospitals and city technology colleges or Blair’s foundation hospitals and city academies, nobody knows how to make the immigration service work or absent fathers pay for their children.

Accusing the Tories of lacking policies is a dangerous argument for Labour to use. The chaos of the British state has become today’s most important political issue. Neither Blair nor Brown nor Cameron has a clue what to do about that. But of the three Cameron is the only one not yet proved a failure.