SHARED OPINION
Mr Blair and The Mysterious Affair of Crime and Crony
FRANK JOHNSON
Mr Blair has made it known that, in view of our criminals' persistence in commit- ting crimes, he intends to set Lord Birt on them for one day a week. I am sorry it has come to this, but the criminals have been asking for it for some time. Now they will have a taste of the management theory and practice which Lord Birt, as Mr John Birt, deployed when BBC director-general. , The press has rightly greeted Lord Birt's new task by describing him as Birtman. Holy Consultancies! Or is that not Superman, but Batman? Not having watched or listened to much of the Birt–Dyke BBC, apart from the news and the Proms, I am not well up on dumbing down. But if Lord Birt really is the caped crusader — and if the caped crusader is Batman rather than Superman — the criminal class can as yet have little idea what committees, focus groups, mission state- ments, and day-long conferences in Home Counties hotels are going to be brought to bear against them. Our criminals can expect many a memo drafted by the appropriate executive task force appointed by Lord Birt: 'The practice of certain Yardies killing one another in north London is to be discontin- ued. Under our revised autumn scheduling, Yardie murders must be confined to south London. This is in no sense ghettoisation. Our most recent studies show that more Yardies live in south London than in north London, though a fact-finding visit to the Caribbean by a sub-committee of qualified cronies, headed up by Lord Birt, ascertained that a larger percentage of the Yardie com- munity lives in Jamaica than in either north or south London with the result that more murders by, and of, Yardies take place in the West Indies than in London as a whole, which is grounds for satisfaction, though not for complacency.'
It may work. A well-known public figure devoting a whole day every week to fighting crime! No one has ever tried that before. We should wish Lord Birt well. But if most of us had to choose the sort of figure to fight crime one day a week, we would not choose someone like Lord Birt, but someone like Lord Tebbit, Lady Thatcher or Attila the Hun. Lord Birt has no known views about crime. But it is fair to assume that they veer towards the liberal. We did not associate the BBC, during his custodianship, with the alternative. People who run parts of the media do not always agree with what their organisation disseminates. But had Lord Birt felt strongly enough that the BBC's attitude to crime was wrong, it is reasonable to sup- pose that he would have done something about it. Yet, instead of zero tolerance, Lord Birt is associated with zero intolerance of the criminal disposition.
This is not to assume that all liberal theo- ries about crime are wrong. It is, however, fair to assume that the Prime Minister, with a general election looming, does not want his one-day-a-week crime fighter to spend that day being all liberal about it. But Birt as crimebuster? More likely crime as Birtbuster. And are there not already those who are sup- posed to spend even more of their time bust- ing crime? They are called chief constables. There is also the Home Secretary. What will Lord Birt do that they are not doing already?
Mr Blair's reasons for this appointment are therefore a mystery — a crime ministry. Perhaps there will be a surprise ending. If I knew, I would naturally spoil it by giving it away. But I do not. Lord Birt's is, then, Mr Blair's strangest appointment so far; The Mysterious Affair of Crime and Crony, as Agatha Christie would have called it. 'Something in the Prime Minister's past made him make the appointment,' her tale would have begun. 'But what was it? Was it the reward for years of deferential ques- tioning on Today and Newsnight, for shield- ing the Prime Minister from a man named Humphrys and a man named Paxman? All agreed that the one thing the appointment had nothing to do with was crime.'
In the same week as Lord Birt's appoint- ment, the Times had the headline: 'Dyke to fire 1,100 of Birt's managers'. That is 1,100 memo-writers and memo-receivers thrown on the scrapheap. Let us hope that they do not turn to crime. If they do, they will assuredly be the subject of a seminar of the type of which they had experience under Lord Birt. That'll deter them.
It is becoming possible to see how Mr Blair might involuntarily depart the premier- ship if — and we must concede that it is still an if — Labour loses many seats at the next general election. (That is unless he does not simply give up, as Harold Wilson did.) If he loses plenty of seats next year, his hold over his party will have gone. He might be over- thrown in the manner of Lloyd George in 1922 and Mrs Thatcher in 1990.
The crucial conditions for the fall of both those prime ministers were that both those governments were coalitions and that in each case the prime minister was in the coalition's minority party. It may be object- ed: of course that was true of Lloyd George; his was a coalition of Liberals and Conserva- tives, and the Liberals, both in the govern- ment and on the government backbenches, were in the minority. (The Liberals had split, it may be remembered, when the Liberal Lloyd George replaced the Liberal Asquith as prime minister of the wartime coalition in 1916 — a majority of the party following Asquith into opposition.) But Mrs Thatcher's was a purely Conser- vative government. In reality, though, it was also a coalition too; of minority Thatcherites and majority Conservatives. The Blair gov- ernment is a coalition of minority Blairites and majority Labour. Admittedly, Blairism is not an ideology, with an economic theory, like Thatcherism. Blairism has no theory. But Mr Blair resembles Mrs Thatcher in that he is tolerated by the majority of his party solely because, and solely as long as, he keeps their jobs and seats. When Mrs Thatcher appeared to become so unpopular as to cease to be able to do that, she was dispensed with. The Liberal Lloyd George was over- thrown by the Conservative, not Liberal, Bonar Law. The Thatcherite Mrs Thatcher was overthrown 13y the Conservative, not Thatcherite, Mr Heseltine. The only differ- ence was that Mr Major was the beneficiary of Mr Heseltine's deed, not Mr Heseltine.
Mr Blair's situation, as prime minister amid a drastically reduced Labour party after the general election, would resemble Lloyd George's (and by extension Mrs Thatcher's) as described in the opening words, and dra- matic italics, of the right-wing press lord Beaverbrook's jolly and gripping book on that prime minister's decline and fall:
On the first day of January 1921 few people stopped to think on the amazing and unprece- dented position of Lloyd George. Certainly his own colleagues, Bonar Law, [Austen] Cham- berlain, Birkenhead, even Churchill, showed no sign of consciousness of the extraordinary political situation.
Lloyd George was a Prime Minister without a party.
There are other uncanny similarities between Mr Blair and the Lloyd George of his fall. There is also the question of who would be Mr Blair's Bonar Law or Heseltine. We must leave those subjects until next week.
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