Brown cares more about faction fights than the betrayal of 25 million citizens
_FF FRASER NELSON f all the many vices Gordon Brown's government was expected to exhibit, few predicted rank incompetence. This was supposed to be the dullbut-effective administration, a workmanlike antidote to the rainbow-chasing of the Blair era. The Prime Minister had been expected to run his government with the iron fist he swung for a decade at the Treasury. Yet when one considers the disasters of the past fortnight, it is far from clear that anyone is running the government at all, let alone competently.
There is so much faux theatricality in the House of Commons that it is rare to hear a genuine gasp of incredulity of the sort that coursed around the chamber when Alistair Darling laid out the scale of the latest and greatest disaster on Tuesday. The personal details of 25 million people, including the bank account numbers and sort codes for every child benefit recipient, had been put on two computer discs which were sent from HM Revenue & Customs in Newcastle to the National Audit Office in London a month ago, and lost in the post. The personal details of every parent in the land are on the loose.
Despite attempts by the Chancellor to blame this on the 'junior official' who sent the data or the courier company, systemic problems are quickly becoming clear. Mr Brown's merger of the Inland Revenue and HM Customs has bequeathed an organisation so dysfunctional that it is possible for data of this sort, of incalculable value to identity fraudsters, to be handled and transferred in the most sloppy, careless manner imaginable. Stories are now emerging about how, postmerger, it was not unusual to find entire rooms of unopened mail What makes all this so toxic for Mr Brown is that it fits a pattern. The appalling disclosure came the very day after Mr Darling had explained why taxpayers may not, after all, see the safe return of the £24 billion of their money that he lent to Northern Rock. It came a week after the Home Secretary's confession that some 5,000 illegal immigrants had been cleared to work in security jobs, including the task of guarding the Prime Minister's car. All this would be richly comic, were it not laden with such serious implications for so many.
The type of incompetence that makes our hospitals so dirty that Marks & Spencer is now selling special MRSA-resistant pyjamas is itself spreading across government. It has been said that HM Revenue & Customs should have treated the sensitive data as a vaccine laboratory would treat the contagion of a disease. This, alas, is precisely the problem. The CDs managed to escape with embarrassing ease, just as foot-and-mouth disease escaped in August from a government research facility.
The irony is that such chaos is unfolding around a Prime Minister who has given up none of his control-freak instincts, despite promises to the contrary. There are tales inside government of ministers shocked to receive an email out of the blue from Mr Brown himself, getting personally involved at a level of detail to which Tony Blair would never have stooped. Yet even a Stakhanovite like Mr Brown does not have the time to oversee every detail of government policy, much as he might like to. So he is becoming overwhelmed.
A dual critique of No. 10 Downing Street is now orthodox across Whitehall. On issues Mr Brown and his team choose to address, the extent of control is almost stifling. 'It makes you wonder what the purpose of other advisers is, given that everything goes through his red pen,' says one source. But in areas in which Mr Brown is not directly involved, there is nothing: no direction, no help, no approval or disapproval. When ministers decide to press ahead on their own, they risk being brutally slapped down.
This explains the dizzying number of Uturns being performed. There is no clear direction from No. 10 on the detention of terror suspects, for example, which is why Lord West, the security minister, changed his mind on the issue in an hour. Only when the Home Office floated a new detention limit of 58 days did No. 10 deliver the thumbs-down. Gerry Sutcliffe, the Sports Minister, learnt too late of Mr Brown's displeasure when he attacked the 'obscene' salaries of footballers. His punishment came in newspaper diary columns, one of the standard conduits now for vengeance.
Mr Brown is being compared to a swimmer surrounded by sharks who, instead of dealing with the situation, asks who sent the sharks. A remarkable example is the witch hunt to find the 'Whitehall knight' who recently had lunch with Sue Cameron of the Financial Times and inspired a wonderfully acerbic report on how Mr Brown is regarded by the civil service. I am told Mr Brown is reasonably confident he has now narrowed the group of suspects down to three.
This gives a worrying sense of Prime Ministerial priorities. One can lose the personal details of 25 million Britons with impunity — but there is to be no hiding-place for civil servants who gossip with journalists during lunch. The message is going out that those who take on No. 10 will be identified and destroyed. But it is precisely this attempt to control which is leading to lack of control. Mr Brown's danger radar is blipping red with disloyal insiders. It seems not to be scanning the political horizon of the outside world, which is perhaps why accidents seem to be coming out of the blue.
Mr Brown is behaving at the start of his premiership in the same way that Lady Thatcher did at the very end of hers. 'What are they doing now?' she would ask despairingly of her Cabinet: the battles had become so intense that the government itself was divided into them and us. In the same way, Mr Brown seems to regard his Cabinet members as human shields who exist to take bullets for him when there is bad news. This is why the beleaguered Mr Darling will stay, for now. His battered body is good for a few more bullets yet.
It is as if Mr Brown has spent so long as a factional leader that he has not grasped the organic unity of his government. If a member of his Cabinet takes a hit, he has not escaped: his reputation also suffers. His skills in fighting internal wars with rival Labour factions may have swept him to No. 10 — but they are not fit for purpose now that he has got there. Yes, the Treasury could be run on a tight leash — not so an entire government.
If the Prime Minister has not yet grasped this, his colleagues have. One could see the grim realisation in the drained expression of those on the Labour benches as they listened to Mr Darling on Tuesday. It was more than a bad day at the office for the Chancellor, far more than a humiliation for the Prime Minister. This was the day when the government's reputation for competence died.
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