POLITICS
If Mr Blair runs his government as a children's crusade, he will eventually get the bird
BRUCE ANDERSON
The atmosphere could hardly have seemed more harmonious if the Tories had won the last election by a large majority. Michael Howard, Peter Lilley and Stephen Dorrell were all in Hague HQ, to welcome their new leader and drink his champagne. Then a fourth leadership candidate arrived, with a crowd of supporters. Ken Clarke seemed the jolliest of the lot; his mood could hardly have been more expansive if he had won. He made a brief and gracious speech, assuring everyone that 'it's not true that we've come here merely because we ran out of beer and crisps'. So a leader and four leadership candidates, all determined to put any campaign rancour behind them, all big men; the only one missing was Mr Redwood, a disappointed man.
One or two of Mr Clarke's middle-rank- ing supporters did not share his bonhomie. They were just coming to terms with the changed nature of the Tory party. As long as Messrs Clarke, Heseltine and Hurd were so dominant in the party's high councils, and as long as Mr Major's conciliatory instincts prevailed over his Eurosceptic ones, it was possible for Europhile Tories to conceal from themselves the extent to which they had lost control of the future. But the new shadow Cabinet has one merit which Mr Major's Cabinets never pos- sessed; it reflects the balance of opinion within the party. So will the Europhiles be able to accept this — to them — adverse balance, especially when Mr Howard sets out European policy in blue-water terms, as he intends to? Mr Hague may feel that his pre- decessor spent too much time negotiating with all the warring factions, but it would be premature to assume that there will be no need for further negotiations. The Tory party may seem to have absorbed the lessons of defeat, and to have rediscovered the habits of discipline and loyalty-, there are bound to be relapses.
But even if the Tories had now solved all their problems, they would still find that it is easier to lose power than to win it back — as Mr Blair is determined to ensure. It is hard to make sense of this new government; it has done so little and been photographed so much. Civil servants, including Labour sym- pathisers, tend to report the same things. Most of their new masters are courteous and good listeners; Robin Cook gets especially high marks, though I have not yet heard any testimony from the Deputy Prime Minister's office. Most of them are also control freaks — a ghastly phrase, as is spin doctor, but is there any way of banishing either from politi- cal vocabulary? They want to see all the papers and take all the decisions; then the problems start. The papers duly arrive on ministers' desks, as per instructions. But no decisions emerge.
The new ministers are of mixed quality, but even some of the able ones are making rueful comments about the sheer workload involved. There are also some hopeless cases, most notably Frank Dobson at health. Before he became an MP, Mr Dob- son was a local government official; he would be at full stretch as number three in the gender equality unit of Camden Coun- cil's rodent infestation department. There have already been a number of contemptu- ous press references to him which have clearly been encouraged from No. 10, and even by his standards Mr Dobson's own media performances have been lamentable. There is an explanation for this: he is terri- fied to say anything lest he get into even more trouble and accelerate the first reshuffle, which will mean his departure. His officials have already been instructed to ensure that he does not even decide whether to have tea or coffee without their first clearing it with Peter Mandelson.
That brings us to another problem. Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell are try- ing to run the entire government in the way they used to run the Labour party, with nothing happening unless they have given prior approval. For one obvious reason, this cannot work; the Labour party is a flO million a year business: the British govern- ment is a f320 billion a year business. But the Mandelson/Campbell approach creates two further short-term liabilities. It helps to explain the delay in decision-taking: in most departments, when the minister tells his civil servants that 'I want to know every- thing that's going on,' he really means `Mandelson and Campbell want to know everything that is going on.' It also increases the strain on particular individuals. Messrs Mandelson and Campbell are used to stress, but one wonders how much they can take without their judgment suffering. If their judgment goes, so does the government's.
But those are matters for the future. As of now, there is only one show in town that has any effect on the government's stand- ing: Mr Blair's travels. He appears to have taken a number of successful gambles. He has allowed himself to be embraced by Bill Clinton; imagine what fun the cartoonists would have had with that at a different stage of the political cycle. He has survived being hailed as the new Camelot by Harry Evans. At least in Britain, Mr Evans is a wholly forgotten figure — and if Mr Blair has any sense he will remain so. But it is worth being reminded of his existence from time to time, for he was the embodiment of all the modish sillinesses of the Sixties and Seventies. Appropriately enough, he has now settled in Manhattan, where he held a bunfight of the vanities for Tony Blair. Again, the reception back here would have been very different if the difficult phase of the Parliament had already begun.
Then there were the children. Mr Blair's children care about the environment, apparently, while the PM himself was moved by a letter a little girl wrote about Northern Ireland. Now there is a case for deploying children, especially when dealing with the sillier types of American — those who would do anything to save the environ- ment, except pay a realistic price for gaso- line. Equally, given the homicidal naivety which some Americans display towards Northern Ireland, it might seem sensible to use an eight-year-old child's opinions, though to say that the arguments are on the same level would be an insult — to the child.
But there are grave political dangers in all this. Back in the presidential debates of 1980, the worst mistake Jimmy Carter made was to cite his daughter Amy's opin- ions on nuclear weaponry. The mockery was unstinted; at least one cartoonist was rather cruel to poor Amy, portraying her as a scrawny, tooth-braced pre-adolescent phoning her friend and saying, 'I can't come play tonight, Emmy-Lou. I'm too busy finishing my paper for Zbiggy Brzezins- ki on the geopolitical implications of Salt II.'
The Americans are generally more senti- mental than the British; more inclined to treat children's views seriously. Yet Mr Carter got the bird. So, unless he is careful, could Mr Blair. Actors know all about the dangers of working with children; the junior branch of the thespian profession should remember that the same applies in politics. If Mr Blair goes on pretending to base his actions on children's advice, there will come a moment when the British peo- ple say `yuck'.
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