Tony Blair has undermined the civil service to make it easier to lie
PETER °BORNE
The Blair government has been timorous on most matters. On public services, welfare reform or the euro it has been hesitant, and at times has given the appearance of being afraid of its own shadow. Even on constitutional change it has veered towards caution — witness the confusion about the shape of the new House of Lords.
But there is one important area where New Labour has been audacious. It has systematically recast the relationship between political party and state. Until Tony Blair came to power all mainstream parties accepted that the civil service was independent and owed its ultimate allegiance only to the Crown — a doctrine which dates back to William Ewart Gladstone's reforms in the 1870s.
New Labour simply refused to accept the Gladstonian settlement. It adopted instead a variant of the Marxist attitude that independent state institutions can never be more than a fiction, and that in practice they are a polite way of concealing the interest of the ruling class. The first thing that New Labour did on winning power was to convert the state machine into a political instrument.
There have been all kinds of manifestations of this constitutionally revolutionary idea: New Labour's enduring hostility to the monarchy; Downing Street's tendency to refer to 'our' armed forces; Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's curious habit of referring to Tony Blair as 'head of state'. The government has just published a document setting out the structure of power within No. 10 which shows how complete the takeover now is. It demonstrates that, leaving aside the Prime Minister, Downing Street is run by three grandees to whom civil servants and others report. All three Jonathan Powell, Alastair Campbell and Baroness Morgan — are party-political appointments. The traditional civil service has been thrust aside, a trend which caused the former Cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong, at a Westminster party last week, to mutter the following words of criticism: 'I am worried about the politicisation of the civil service. It is a particular problem in Downing Street.' This was an astonishing, unprecedented warning from such a senior and discreet figure, and as such a testament to the scale of the problem.
There are two key elements to the constitutional coup so noiselessly carried out within No. 10. The first is the effective abo [Won of the old post of principal private secretary to the Prime Minister. The formal title continues, but the job has been downgraded and the essential functions devolved to Jonathan Powell, a party official. This means that the man who acts as the Prime Minister's 'gatekeeper' is no longer a civil servant but a political hack. It was Jonathan Powell who allowed Tony Blair to meet the billionaire Labour donor Bernie Ecclestorie without civil servants present. He may have played a similar role in promoting the interests of Enron, the Indian financier Lakshmi Mittal, and doubtless any number of other figures of whom we as yet know nothing. The problem with having a party official as chief of staff in Downing Street is very clear. He is supposed to guard the interests of the New Labour faction on the one hand, and the nation at large on the other. It is a system which embeds the risk of corruption into the heart of government — which was why Gladstone put a stop to it.
The second half of Tony Blair's constitutional coup was equally important. It derived from the basic New Labour insight that information is not a value-free commodity. Tony Blair and the highly intelligent and dedicated group of men and women around him grasped very early on with Leninist ruthlessness that information is a political weapon. Press secretaries and information officers in the days before New Labour were civil servants who took a boring, sober. empirical attitude to the facts.
Practically the first thing Tony Blair did on becoming Prime Minister was to appoint Alastair Campbell as his press secretary. Campbell — who last week expanded his empire to include the Central Office of Information and with it the largest advertising budget in Britain, bigger even than Procter & Gamble's — was, from the first, openly contemptuous of the 'lazy' civil service information machine he inherited. Campbell has always been engagingly hon est about his intention to use the government information service as an instrument of New Labour. Though in some ways an attractive figure, he is always ready to lie, deceive and cheat in order to protect his master Tony Blair. Campbell, like the rest of the New Labour army, regards truth as a commodity that can happily be disregarded in the cause of a greater good: a very striking attitude indeed to be found at the heart of Downing Street.
The Mittal affair, which may yet develop into the most serious crisis to hit the Blair government, is the direct consequence of the novel constitutional arrangement which came into effect after 1997. In order to happen, it required first the confusion of party and state symbolised most readily by the ambiguous presence of Jonathan Powell at the heart of the government machine. It is hard to imagine that conventional civil servants would have permitted a British prime minister to intervene at head of government level to promote the overseas interests of a stray foreign billionaire with no meaningful links with Britain bar a house in Hampstead and a recently acquired habit of making large donations to the governing party.
Secondly, it would never have become an issue of confidence had not the Downing Street machine and the Prime Minister personally been prepared to lie about the transaction. There was the demonstrable lie made by the Prime Minister that the company is British. In fact. about 0.009 per cent of its employees are based in Britain. There was the demonstrable lie that his letter to the Romanian Prime Minister was purely formal and had no bearing on the outcome. There was the demonstrable Downing Street lie that Mittal's LNM group has its world headquarters in the UK.
Nothing that Tony Blair or Downing Street assert about the Mittal business makes sense. I do not believe, as No. 10 suggests, that the British ambassador to Romania was the driving force behind this business. It will take a great deal of work to convince me of the Downing Street claim that Keith Vaz had no role in promoting the Romanian steel deal. Something stinks here. Tony Blair has been caught out lying before, twice during the Ecclestone affair. It feels strange to be writing these words — but the time may soon come when it has to be asked whether Blair has the personal integrity to be British Prime Minister.
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