While Blair is away at the war, Brown is making steady gains on the domestic front
PETER OBORNE
Not long before the outbreak of hostilities Roy Jenkins noted that Tony Blair's method of government resembled the rotatory beam of a lighthouse. The Prime Minister has no regard for his colleagues. With very few exceptions he thinks of the fellow members of his Cabinet, insofar as he thinks of them at all, as incompetent or misguided or both. He takes the view that government can only be carried out by himself, some favoured allies and a handful of intimates or cronies within Downing Street.
Hence Lord Jenkins's analogy. When the full force of the rotatory beam — in other words, Tony Blair's Downing Street trusties — illuminates a given area, as it attempted to do with the health service in the immediate aftermath of the general election, then the response is impressive. The Prime Minister takes oft his jacket, rolls up his shirtsleeves and gives orders. Papers get written, decisions made; at the very least an illusion of progress is created.
Then, after this short but intense period of activity, the beam sweeps on. Health returns to its usual state of purposeless, bureaucratic inertia. Some other area of government briefly becomes the focus of attention. The problem since 11 September is that the Downing Street rotatory beam has got stuck. It is directed, to the exclusion of all else, at the Middle East and the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, to which Britain's tangible contribution has so far been limited to the dispatch of two cruise missiles from nuclear-powered submarines, the first on day one of the bombing, the second some two weeks later. The Prime Minister's contribution has been his personal brand of effusive diplomacy, with the Foreign Secretary reduced to the role of humiliated and sidelined bystander, an entirely characteristic posture for a Cabinet minister in the Blair administration.
It remains to be seen whether or not all this has helped the war effort. What is undeniable is that Tony Blair has flung himself into this crisis with an energy and commitment that precludes him from paying attention to any other area of government whatsoever. The result has been telling. Domestic politics has gone on after a fashion, at least in the sense that ministers, officials, etc. have continued to turn up to work and do their jobs. Decisions have continued to be taken, or at any rate not taken. Ministers, who have become accustomed to being monitored and second-guessed from the centre, have suddenly found themselves in a position where they can, if they want, think and even act for themselves.
An early result of the novel state of affairs came when Stephen Byers, previously the most cautious and unassertive of Cabinet ministers, adventurously set out to nationalise RaiItrack. It is inconceivable that this course of action, and above all the attendant expropriation of shareholders' assets, so fundamentally at odds with everything that New Labour claims to stand for, would ever have been embarked upon had Tony Blair's attention not been wholly engaged elsewhere. The mess Byers caused by acting on his own initiative was so great that it momentarily drew the Prime Minister's attention back to domestic politics. He indicated, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, that shareholders would indeed be compensated. But this was a mere fleeting intervention which lacked either authority or substance. A few days later Dan Corry, special adviser to Byers, told a shareholders' representative 'not to attach too much weight to what the Prime Minister said'.
Transport policy was a shambles before 11 September and is even more of a shambles now. The same applies to health, which is beginning to cause acute concern to ministers. Labour party managers have brought forward the Ipswich by-election, precipitated by the death of Jamie Cann, to 22 November. This sense of almost indecent urgency derives from a deep fear within government that the NHS will collapse over the coming months. Given a flu epidemic, or even a moderately cold winter, ministers fear that the NHS will no longer be able to cope. One health trust chief executive told me, 'We have been running on empty for the last few years. This winter we will really break.'
The post-11 September crisis has exposed most ministers — think of Geoff Hoon, Jack Straw or Stephen Byers — as incompetent or simply out of their depth. There have been two exceptions: David Blunkett and, as ever, Gordon Brown. The Chancellor is this week being regarded within Downing Street, which relished his initial discomfort at being left out of the loop during the war, with even more distrust than ever. One Blairite told me at the beginning of last week that Brown has been listening attentively, and even sympathetically, to the many and various concerns about the war being expressed by Labour backbenchers. No evidence was produced to bolster this assertion, and it should be remembered that the Chancellor could not have been more loyal or supportive in his speech to the Labour party conference last month. Nevertheless, the fact that such claims are being made points to the distrust in which Brown is held.
Brown has used the vacuum at the centre since 11 September to shift domestic policy on to his own agenda. He has finally won his long semi-public argument with Tony Blair on tax; it even seems possible that the Chancellor will announce his tax increases as early as the autumn Budget statement, due in a few weeks' time. But Brown has brought Blair — who proclaimed in 1997 that 'the age of tax and spend is dead' — with him on tax. The real, ugly, bitter point of contention between the two men is the euro. There are some observers who affect to believe that the Chancellor and the Prime Minister play an orchestrated 'good cop, bad cop' game on the single currency. But anyone believing that a deliberate strategy is being executed cannot have been party to the private briefing that attended Gordon Brown's speech to the CBI last week, or the Downing Street fury that greeted it.
The vendetta between No. 10 and the Treasury is unfeigned. There are those in Downing Street who are convinced that Gordon Brown is only half-heartedly behind this war, and readying himself to play Macmillan (First In, First Out) to Tony Blair's Eden if it goes wrong. That is looking much too far ahead. But the stakes have suddenly become very high, and the consequences of both victory and defeat are incalculable.
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