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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday January 20 2002 01.11 GMT
The leader of this government - and it is surely only a question of time before he is retitled the Prime Strategic Minister - cannot make decisions with the help of mere advisers. What might have been good enough for Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher will not do for Tony Blair. The magnifico at the Prime Minister's court who is John Birt must be called a strategic adviser. Indeed, his lordship likes to style himself as THE Strategic Adviser to the Prime Minister. Which must trouble all those other souls toiling strategically inside the Number 10 Forward Strategy Unit. Mr Blair births strategists like Queen Victoria bred children. Such is the density of the stratosphere in Downing Street, I wouldn't be surprised to find that Number 10 has a Backward Strategy Unit.
You cannot help but entertain the suspicion, especially after such a muddled week as this last one, that New Labour goes on so much about strategy because it has no strategy. All that soi-disant strategising offers the illusion to the governed - and, more importantly perhaps, to the governors - that they really know where they are going.
The government has drifted into January on a mounting swell of media criticism accompanied by a strong undertow of public disillusionment and increasingly choppy backbenchers. Important Ministers - Jack Straw, Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers all endure torrid times - are shipping water. Derry Irvine's cobblers of a scheme for the Lords , the consequence of New Labour's failure to have a strategic plan for the constitution, is already 10 leagues under.
Labour MPs, so a senior Cabinet officer lamented to me after one bruising encounter with the mutinous deckhands, are 'much more fractious than during our first term'. The backbenches have swollen with the sacked and the damned, ex-Ministers and wannabe Ministers who have begun to realise that they never will be Ministers. This bad patch for the Government has coincided with flickers of life from the Tories. Rumours of the death of the Conservative Party are proving to be somewhat exaggerated. Tory frontbenchers are finally doing and saying a few clever things: in Mr Blair's own words to a private meeting, the Tories are 'beginning to get the hang of opposition'. A scattering of small scores does not turn IDS into the leader of a plausible alternative government. Rumours of the resurrection of the Tory party have also been somewhat exaggerated. Where there may be many gaps in the Government's designs for the public services, the Tories are one vast black hole. Still, the revival of interest in the Conservatives adds to the twitches in this nervy government.
So does the impression that New Labour is lapsing into some of the worst habits of its first term. One of the promises that Mr Blair made outside Number 10 on the morning after his re-election was that he would go away and spin no more. There would be more governing for the long-term; less snatching after tomorrow's headlines.
The New Year is not very old before this resolution appears to have been broken. The Prime Minister returns from his foreign travels to be greeted by a press froth that he is away too much. Pollsters find that a lot of voters think he's arrogant. With utter predictability, Mr Blair announces his landfall in Britain by declaring his 'passion' for public services and a sequence of ministerial announcements tries to put some flesh on the prime ministerial emoting. If it's Monday, it's transport. If it's Tuesday, it's health. If it's Wednesday, it's education. If it's Thursday, it's crime. If it's Friday, it's health again.
This outbreak of initiativitis - reversing policy on school bullying, dressing up old money as new for the railways, announcing health reforms which Ministers only recently excoriated when suggested by the Tories - all adds to the feeling of a government losing the plot.
Tony Blair's latest narrative of his government is that it is struggling in its second term because it could only do so much during its first. Health and transport were, he implicitly concedes, rather neglected because he chose to concentrate on the economy and education. That tells us much about the caution and short-termism with which New Labour has approached government. In the first five years of its life, the Attlee government managed to create the health service, expand education, form the welfare state, nationalise heavy industries, go to war in Korea and build the nuclear bomb. All that was achieved, moreover, in conditions of severe economic crisis. Members of the Attlee Cabinet came to office with a strategic vision implemented by individual Ministers who enjoyed the talent and power to create and execute radical policy.
The hierarchy of this government, in which Ministers are subject to the fiat and whim of Number 10 and the Treasury, teaches them to be timid. Mr Blair indicated his initial lack of interest in a proper reforming agenda for health and transport by giving those crucial areas to two old Labourish figures, John Prescott and Frank Dobson, neither of whom possessed the money or independence of action to make a large difference.
At the very first Cabinet meeting of this government's life, in the heady days of May 1997, Tony Blair told his colleagues that 'the railways are not a priority'. That was also the view of the Chancellor, the only other figure in the Cabinet with the power to make big things happen. John Prescott, a man much weaker than he looks, was crushed. The health story has been similar. Mr Blair did not fully focus on health until the winter flu crisis in early 2000. Only then was serious attention given to the NHS's need for money and reform.
Many of the Government's present problems with public services flow from one of the few strategic decisions that was made during its first term. The most important of them was to stick to Tory budgets for the first two years of its life. In the not untruthful words of one of the Prime Minister's closest advisers: 'We are still feeling the pain of that.' As, incidentally, is the public.
Even now some money is flowing, New Labour remains uncertain about the most effective means of delivery. The plans for the NHS are riddled with tensions between encouraging local initiative in the health service and imposing central controls. This government lacks a worked-through view of the proper relationship between the state and the private sector. Mr Byers has discovered that private management is a disaster at running the tracks; Mr Milburn concludes that private management is so wonderful that it can provide the solution to failing hospitals. We can only pray that none of those redundant Railtrack executives brings his great expertise in waiting times to the NHS. New Labour still does not have a coherent idea, consistently applied, of what it is for and where it is going.
I am tempted to formulate a new law of politics: the number of strategists employed by a Prime Minister is in inverse proportion to his ability to get anything done.
