Hilary Armstrong is the worst chief whip in memory.
That may not matter now but it will
PETER OBORNE
Dull, commonplace slightly stupid, wholly lacking in wit or imagination, Hilary Armstrong is beyond a shadow of a doubt the worst government chief whip in memory. Her now famous verbal assault on Paul Marsden, a hitherto unknown backbencher, has been widely condemned as an abuse of her position. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is the job of a chief whip to terrorise dissident MPs into complying with the wishes of the prime minister of the day.
The problem with Armstrong is that she failed miserably to carry out this elementary function. Rather than leaving his meeting with the chief whip a gibbering wreck, Marsden was emboldened to make contact with the political editor of the Mail on Sunday, to whom he communicated the details of his conversation.
Anybody who takes the trouble to read the transcript which duly appeared in the Sunday papers can only have been struck by the absence of personal authority and the pitiful lack of any kind of intellectual grip. And this should come as no surprise. Immediately after the last election, Tony Blair and his henchman Alastair Campbell indicated to the Labour party at large that they no longer considered the whips' office of real importance in maintaining discipline.
They did this in three ways. They sacked many of the most senior members of the office, such as Jim Dowd and Graham Allen. Previous governments have always used the whips' office as a means of fast-streaming talent: by sacking so many outright, Tony Blair was indicating that he regarded the office as a dead-end job. He replaced them with a collection of lightweights, of whom Armstrong herself, hitherto fully stretched as a local government minister, was the most egregious case in point.
But the most deadly and contemptuous action was the decision to boot the whips' office out of No. 12 Downing Street, the magnificent premises that had been their lair since the 19th century. Alastair Campbell and his communications team were installed instead: the most potent statement imaginable that manipulating the media matters more to Tony Blair than managing Parliament. If anyone now possesses the mystique and authority of Michael Dobbs's fictitious chief whip, Francis Urquhart, it is Campbell and emphatically not the hapless Hilary Armstrong.
The occupation of No. 12 was a flagrant statement that Campbell, his now vanquished coeval Peter Mandelson, and the shadowy collection of men and women that surround them have established a novel system of government. Decisions are made in the dark, without reference to the established civil-service framework, by people who are accountable to nobody, and have nothing but distaste for probity or constitutional doctrine. Cabinet ministers are held in contempt. There was a fresh instance of this disquieting syndrome this week when a Downing Street press officer was authorised to hang the hapless Armstrong out to dry over the Marsden affair.
Jo Moore, whose email calling on civil servants to 'bury' bad news after 11 September, is one of the most highly placed members of the new governing cadre that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell have imposed on Whitehall since 1997. Her salary tells you everything. Moore, who was Tony Blair's personal press officer in opposition and a member of the New Labour 'family', is reported to be paid 01,000 a year for a two-day week. This salary — never confirmed but never challenged by government sources — puts her on the same day-rate as a Cabinet minister and two-and-a-half times that of a backbench MP.
The Prime Minister has made no secret of his desire to govern Britain along more 'presidential' lines. This ambition means in practice that he is determined to surround himself with yet more people like Moore and Campbell. This is in part because he knows that they, unlike ministers and MPs, can have no power-base of their own and therefore give their loyalty only to him. Moore and Campbell are essentially postdemocratic political figures. As Professor Colin Crouch of the University of Florence has recently asserted in a compelling treatise, contemporary British politics is far closer in tone and process to the 19th or even the 18th century than to the healthy participatory environment of the mid-20th century. New Labour is well on the way to perfecting a system where government is dominated by a narrow, self-serving, exclusive political caste with its own jargon and sectional interests. The majority of the population, as in the 18th century, is becoming disfranchised once again, as the shockingly low turnout in the June election demonstrated, Apathy and cynicism, rather than denial of the suffrage, are the agents of this new alienation.
The new elite, of which Jo Moore is such a characteristic example, has renounced traditional methods of addressing the voter: the hustings, the debating chamber and oratory on the stump. They communicate through manipulation and artifice, finessed by technologies such as focus groups borrowed from the advertising profession. Guiding all is a cheap and unattractive populism, and in particular a devil's pact with the tabloid press. All this helps explain the lies, distortion and deception which are systemic in Tony Blair's Downing Street. The new political class he has brought to life holds the people in fearful contempt, and does not in its heart believe that they can be trusted with the truth. This outlook explains New Labour's instinctive mendacity, of which a further three examples have come to light in the past week: Geoffrey Robinson's lies about his relationship with the late Robert Maxwell; Gus Macdonald's flagrant attempt to mislead the House of Lords; and Jo Moore's own deception of the Sunday Times over Railtrack.
It would be idle to deny that New Labour's modern version of court politics played a role in making Tony Blair a prodigiously effective leader of the opposition. It has proved catastrophic in government, and there is no sign whatever that anyone in power really wants to deal with the problem. The structural flaws that will one day bring this government down have been fully exposed this week, and there is every sign that Tony Blair will pay a full price for his decision to castrate the whips. Last July, Hilary Armstrong led Labour to its first defeat in the Commons, over a characteristic Downing Street attempt to manipulate the chairmanship of Commons committees.
On Tuesday night, Labour MPs including Paul Marsden, now, I am told, in talks with the Liberal Democrats — defied a three-line whip for the first time by voting with the Tories. We are only months into a new parliament, and already the chief whip has lost her authority.
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