New laid-back Labour goes on holiday while the Tories tear themselves apart
PETER ()BORNE This has been the quietest August anyone in Downing Street can remember. The first few summers of the Blair premiership were all filled with vigorous, though often meaningless, activity. Announcements, briefings, initiatives, publicity stunts of one kind or another were disgorged every day on to apathetic Fleet Street news desks. With Tony Blair away, John Prescott would arrive at No, 10 at 9 a.m. sharp to 'take control'. It was as if New Labour had some nameless terror of adopting an attitude of repose.
Not this month. There has been no sign of John Prescott venturing into Downing Street. Only five press releases have emerged from the normally industrious No. 10 press release factory in the entire month. On I August came news that Michael Brinton, a carpet manufacturer, had been made Lord Lieutenant for Worcestershire, an appointment surely to be welcomed. Two days later came the no less regrettable decision to give Lord Haskins the role of rural recovery co-ordinator, swiftly followed by details of how Downing Street proposed to cover up its scandalous mishandling of the foot-andmouth epidemic.
There followed a lull, which was broken by news that Kevin Barron, an obscure Labour MP, has been given a privy counsellorship. This looked quite baffling. Privy counsellorships are normally a sign of impending promotion to the Cabinet, and there is no danger of that as far as Barron, who represents Rother Valley, is concerned. However it has since been explained to me that Barron, a man of limited imagination, is the great Commons campaigner against tobacco advertising. A Bill against tobacco advertising was promised in the Queen's Speech, but dropped at the last moment. 'Kevin was all set to make a great fuss,' claims a New Labour fixer. Time will tell whether Barron is so easily silenced.
In the last two weeks, there has been just one press release, concerning an appointment to the Security Vetting Appeals Panel, a vexatious body set up in 1997 to enable peevish civil servants to complain when they are refused security clearance. In short, Downing Street has gone to sleep.
There have been two reasons for this uncharacteristic inertia. One is the new style of government that dates from the last election. Tony Blair has come to recognise that New Labour's old method of media management, and all the lies, half truths, distortions and bombast that went with it, had damaged the good standing of the office of prime minister as well as his personal integrity. He has decided to do something about it. Some admirers of the Prime Minister have claimed, absurdly, that Downing Street has become less obsessed with the media. That is nonsense, as can be demonstrated by the fact that this autumn Alastair Campbell and his communications empire are likely to take over No. 12 Downing Street. This magnificent red-brick house has been the base of the Chief Whip since the 19th century. The eviction of the whips, and their replacement by the media boss, is the perfect symbol for the way that parliamentary democracy has been strangled under New Labour. Constitutional historians are likely to study the circumstances of such a transfer with close attention. The key enforcement officer, and source of patronage, in all government before Tony Blair's was the Chief Whip. With Tony Blair it is the media boss who counts, and now he may move into the Chief Whip's office for good measure.
So the media obsession has not diminished. But it has evolved. The Downing Street decision not to compete with the Tory party for headlines this summer is a product of the new, composed style. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell are more than happy to take a step back, go on holiday and allow the Tories to take centre stage and display themselves in all their ghastliness and absurdity. Sometime around the middle of last week their leadership election took a disastrous wrong turn. It changed from a seemly, moderately well-regulated public dispute into an unseemly, poorly regulated public brawl. It was meant to be a catharsis. In fact the opposite has been the case. It has not merely been the occasion for the settling of old scores; it has been the arena for the enthusiastic ore ation of new ones. It makes the 1997 leadership election, which did not lack skulduggery or name-calling, look tame. It is the most vicious event of its sort since Tony Benn and Denis Healey slugged it out for the Labour party deputy leadership in 1981. The Tory party went into this leadership election incapable of forming a government. It may come out of it incapable of forming an opposition.
It is not surprising that the press, never shy of intruding upon private grief, has given the widest possible coverage to this melancholy story of personal abuse, namecalling, treachery and hand-to-hand combat. But Tory supporters would be wrong to think that they have regained a central role in British political life because they are presently winning newspaper headlines. That would be a snare and a delusion. The Tories are winning newspaper headlines because they are making a spectacle of themselves. They should not forget that the only thing that seriously matters remains Tony Blair's administration at No. 10.
The real story of August — and not even the suspension of the Downing Street publicity machine can conceal the fact — is a looming battle for the soul of New Labour. Over the next six months, Tony Blair will face something like the same sort of challenge to his low-tax, market-friendly strategy that Margaret Thatcher faced to her monetarist policies 20 years ago. The second successive Labour election victory was a persona] triumph for the Prime Minister, but inconveniently for him it has unleashed a new confidence on the Left. This month there has been open talk, from John Prescott and others, of a rise in taxation. Up in Liverpool Peter Kilfoyle has been mutinously plotting an insurgency over nuclear missile defence. There is trouble ahead on university tuition fees. Tony Blair is well aware that next month's Labour conference will be the most turbulent he has faced. The emblematic issue is likely to be private-sector partnerships.
The central dialogue in British politics is between New Labour and the resurgent Left, in alliance with the opportunistic Liberal Democrats. That will be the dominant theme of the autumn season, starting at the TUC conference in two weeks' time (the first gathering of its kind to matter since the 1980s). The Tories are not being heard in this debate. They never will be until they learn to turn their fire on the Labour government and not upon each other.
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