Mr Blair has virtually unlimited power. The trouble is that he doesn't know how to use it
PETER ()BORNE The Blair administration is set upon running Britain without reference to the institutions and common practice of state: Parliament, the monarchy and the system of common law. This week saw a fresh manifestation of this novel, direct, centralised method of government with the eviction of the whips from their base in No. 12 Downing Street, the large, familiar, redbrick building from where the chief whip can wander easily through to No. 10. His or her ability to do so has long been an essential part of smooth government and a testament that Parliament mattered.
But the chief whip Hilary Armstrong and her colleagues are to be thrown out to make way for the army of special advisers and technocrats who are the characteristic figures of this Blair government. Nobody knows where Armstrong will go, and nobody cares. The chief whip until very recently possessed formidable power and mystique. But Hilary Armstrong is an administrative drudge, so unimportant that no one has yet bothered to warn her of her impending eviction, which will most likely take place during the summer recess that is expected to be called for the early date of 20 July.
Tony Blair has decided to throw out the chief whip because he needs the space. He is probably, at this moment, the most powerful peacetime prime minister Britain has ever had. His style of government is frequently called presidential. But that is absurd. Tony Blair possesses far more power — within his own limited domain — than any US president. He has pretty well total freedom of action, and is restrained by none of the countervailing forces with which prime ministers normally have to cope — Parliament, Cabinet, the opposition, etc.
The trouble is that he has not learnt how to exercise this power. The story of the first four years of the Blair administration was one of frustration. The Prime Minister pulled levers, and found that they did not respond. He issued commands, and discovered that they had no effect. He felt the same blind anger — so one of his allies told me — that overcame Hitler in his bunker when he attempted to mobilise non-existent divisions on the Eastern Front. Like Hitler, he vented his anger on commanders in the field. Well before last month's general election, Tony Blair had concluded that the civil service was to blame. three weeks restructuring Whitehall. It is impossible to exaggerate how much all these new 'delivery units', 'forward strategy units' and sprawling new departments of state mean to the Prime Minister. For him they are the difference between success and failure. Tony Blair is trying to create a delineated command structure that will enable him to control, monitor and enforce his programme of thoroughgoing public-sector reforms.
These changes have to work if Blair's second term is not, like his first, to disappoint. But, from the outside at least, they look like a spectacular buggers' muddle. The Prime Minister has failed to grasp at least three fundamental problems. The first of these is the fact that, nominally at any rate, John Prescott is running the show. This is what the press release entitled 'Delivering Effective Government' proclaimed on 8 June, the day after the election: 'An office of the Deputy Prime Minister will be established in the Cabinet office. The Deputy Prime Minister will chair a number of key Cabinet committees. He will act with the full authority of the Prime Minister in overseeing the delivery of manifesto pledges.'
The problem here is not merely that John Prescott, during his first four years in government, demonstrated to the satisfaction of the entire world his inability to reform public services. It is worse than that. He is regarded as a buffoon by Downing Street. He is the fourth Cabinet minister to take charge at the Cabinet office. In each of the first three cases — David Clark, Jack Cunningham and Mo Mowlam — the job proved to be an exit lounge from Cabinet. This will be the fate of John Prescott as well. The fact that he has been given an enormous office makes no difference.
I am told that he has already had his first stand-up row with Jeremy Heywood, the blond prodigy who runs Tony Blair's private office. John Prescott, like Mo Mowlam, has the job because Tony Blair could think of nothing else to do with him. The real work, as subsequent Downing Street briefing has made humiliatingly clear, will be done by a cadre of junior Cabinet office ministers, of whom Lord Macdonald is the most important. But the decision to put Prescott in charge deprives them of the Whitehall status they need.
The second problem is that Tony Blair has failed to get to grips with the civil service. Recent events at the Department of Culture illustrate the scale of this dereliction. All four ministers were sacked in the post-election reshuffle in an unprecedented bloodletting. They were being punished — so the word went round Whitehall — for a series of blunders of which Wembley Stadium was the least spectacular. Fair enough. But Robin Young, Chris Smith's permanent secretary at Culture, was simultaneously promoted to the DTI. The decision to merge the No. 10 policy unit with the Prime Minister's private office looks — from the outside — to be another victory for the mandarin class. When Bernard Donoughue formed the unit under Harold Wilson, it was specifically set apart from the private office so that it could offer the Prime Minister an alternative to official policy advice.
The third problem is the Treasury. You can have as many units, committees and bright ideas as you like, but none of them has the least effect as long as the Treasury decides where the money goes. Tony Blair has resisted the advice of his advisers and has left Gordon Brown alone: Blair is the first prime minister to surrender the privilege of chairing the key economic affairs sub-committee since Harold Wilson made the same mistake in 1964, while the Treasury and not No. 10 Downing Street continues to control the public-service agreements that enforce standards and fiscal discipline.
There is an alternative style of government to the command structure which Tony Blair has endeavoured in his clumsy way to impose on Whitehall. It is associated with Clement Attlee, the post-war Labour prime minister. Attlee gave colleagues their head. He did not try to direct their every move. He let them take the credit. He operated what is fondly known as Cabinet government. And he was, beyond peradventure, the greatest reforming Labour prime minister of the last century. His real, enduring achievements dwarf Tony Blair's. Clem Attlee would never have moved the whips office out of Downing Street.
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