Is David Blunkett really the father of the government's right-wing policies?

FRANK JOHNSON

Conservatives, fearing the loss to New Labour of what they consider their territory, constantly insist that David Blunkett's policies are not what he would have middle-class and oldfashioned working-class voters believe. Tory spokesmen were doing it again this week.

It must be an emotionally turbulent time for the 1 tome Secretary. As so often, only our tabloids could do it justice.

'Home Secretary David Blunkett is claiming that he is the father of the right-wing policies born four years ago after he began a relationship with the Home Office, He is furious that shadow home secretary David Davis is saying that the policies are his.

'A desperate Blunkett asked friends, "How many visiting Polish building-site workers do I have to chuck out of Eurostar's windows on their way under the Channel, or through Kent, before Davis admits that the policies are mine'?"

'The relationship with the Home Office began when Blunkett was heard to say at a dinner party that he had always wondered what it would be like to be a right-wing home secretary. Later, he and the Home Office permanent officials started seeing one another. Soon the relationship became the talk of Westminster and Whitehall, and was hinted at in the media. It became fully public when Mr Blunkett started being praised in the Daily Mail.

'News of the relationship has caused a scandal in the Labour party. Said one Labour backbencher, "We couldn't care less about his private life. But we get worried when he tries to deport hook-handed, proterrorist mullahs." Such comments convinced Mr Blunkett that the relationship was going well.

Then came the bombshell Tory claim that the policies weren't his. Or if they were, that they weren't really right-wing. Or if they were right-wing, he just talked about being a rightwing home secretary, and was too frightened of the Labour party and the liberal media to put the policies into practice. But friends of Mr Blunkett insisted that the policies were really his and the result of a loving relationship. One said, "When David heard what the Tories were saying about who was the real father of his policies, he was absolutely gutted. Those policies mean everything to him. He never thought he would meet them at his time of life. They brought him laughter and happiness. He had so much in common with them. He's just not going to let them go.

'A Home Office spokesman said, "The Home Secretary never comments on his public life. This is a matter between him and just a few million middle-class voters in marginal seats. It is a deeply public matter."

'Mr Blunkett is divorced. The policies produced by his marriage, when he was leader of Sheffield City Council, were Old Labour.'

But the Conservatives will not catch Mr Blunkett being liberal. True, earlier this year, Mr Davis forced a Home Office junior minister to resign For seeming to be too tolerant of illegal migrants. But she was a junior minister, not Mr Blunkett. Also, her errors were as much to do with blundering officialdom, for which she had to take responsibility, as with liberalism.

Every age has a parliamentarian who is unique to it, and Mr Blunkett is ours. He rose to be an important Cabinet minister — and only a minority of Cabinet ministers at any given moment are important — from exceptionally humble origins. That is an achievement, but not unusual. Labour politicians have done it since Ramsay MacDonald. But Mr Blunkett did it while also being blind. He has become so much part of the national life that we tend to take that for granted. But we who have observed him from the Commons gallery have never ceased to marvel at him. When he makes a statement, he reads from a Braille script. But he cannot be sure that he has the Braille notes which would help him to answer every backbencher's unexpected question. Any other minister can consult such notes as he has, and even then often makes a mess of it. But Mr Blunkett must usually rely on memory. Thus his dispatch-box appearances are awesome.

Mr Blunkett's policies are part of the Tories' problem, not its solution. They are open to liberal censure. The previous shadow home secretary, Oliver Letwin, tried to oppose many of them from a liberal standpoint. There was something unconvincing about a Tory shadow home secretary trying to assail a Labour home secretary from the left. We may suspect that most Tory, or potentially Tory, voters admire Mr Blunkett and agree with him most of the time. He is open to adverse criticism from a 'libertarian' position, but most Tories are not libertarians. They understand that authority has its part in the arrangements of society. Michael Howard certainly understood that as home secretary. Most Tory politicians, however, fear liberal censure since they live in a sophisticated, metropolitan and cosmopolitan world in which such censure is feared. It used to be non-Tories who felt inferior in influential London society; now it is Tories. Mr Blunkett feels no such thing, and hence has no fear of what polite society says about him. If the Tories could attract to their ranks more politicians of his origins, and social self-confidence, they would not be in the trouble in which they have found themselves since at least 1997. That is one of the many reasons why Tories, and quite a few Labour voters, without necessarily saying that he is right about all of them, sympathise with the Home Secretary in any matter in which he is engaged, public or private.

NJ hatever is thought about making hunting illegal, it should be hoped that the pro-hunting incursion into the High Court fails. The hunters are trying to subject the ban to judicial review — that is, to persuade the judges to rule that it is unconstitutional.

The rise of judicial review in recent years is contrary to the spirit of the British constitution. However unmodish it is to say so, in the British constitution, Parliament is, or should be, sovereign. Judicial review has been introduced here from the United States. There, the formal separation of powers justifies it. But it helped prolong — among other things — slavery and segregation. The Supreme Court — judicial review's embodiment — ruled for years that they were a matter for the states, not Washington. In Britain a parliamentary majority would have abolished both at a stroke, as slavery was abolished.

We should deplore the ban on hunting, but not disrupt the constitution in an attempt to stop it.