The Hitch

Obituaries are a way of life in this country. Every newspaper carries at least one, if not several  each day, varying from those at the centre of policy making, to heroes of the two world wars that have been burnt on our collective conscience, aristocrats, and the seemingly ordinary. Even the PE teacher who berated Margaret Thatcher over the sinking of the Belgrano was recently granted a note in the Daily Telegraph.

In Hitch 22, Christopher Hitchens remarked that one of his many literary friends announced to another quite gleefully over breakfast that he had been asked to write another’s obituary for the Times, which famously stockpiles its memorials just in case. The other stayed quiet, fully aware that he had already submitted his tormentor’s obituary some weeks before.

I delve into the unglamorous mechanics of how these words reach our retinas because the medium of writing could not be more important to my subject. How and what Christopher Hitchens wrote was the very measure of him, as almost all his friends and acquaintances acknowledge, and how his death at the relatively untimely age of sixty-two occasioned so many obituaries distinguishes him from each melancholy rememberance. Almost everyone is remembered, somehow, but few people are really celebrated.

Hitchens was hardly anything if not a writer, and a writer’s writer at that. He saved his most approving words and his most genial conversation for other writers, frequently offering a drink to young hacks in his adopted hometown of Washington, taking long boozy lunches with the Bloomsbury set in the 1980s and 1990s (the word games were legendary).

Politics, and politicians were distinctly on the other side – people to be watched and critiqued. The Clintons were his particular bete noir – he found Bill questionable in his approach to women and campaign monies, Hilary a compulsive liar and a coward for the way she sacrificed a meaningful intervention in the Balkans for a health care reform that was never achieved. Henry Kissinger he never could stand and wished to bring to trial. Such is the way of the professional journalist.

Ideas were also important, and marked the difference between Hitchens and the Gonzo school of journalism, which he claimed not to care a great deal for. Hunter S. Thompson could drink similar amounts and savaged Richard Nixon with words as savage as Hitchens ever deployed, but his journalism was fundamentally theatrical and more passionate than rational. Hitchens could hate and poor scorn over a person simply because of their beliefs, hence his critique of Mother Theresa, the woman whose resistance to female emancipation merely entrenched policy.

Hitchens’ tendancy to demolish words that could be used to describe him makes it difficult to pin him down. He considered neo-conservative a misonomer, pointing out that he was rarely conservative, and liberal wishy-washy. His lack of interest in political economy made his socialism a practical non-starter, despite his early Trotskyism. In a recent interview, Hitchens, trying to synthesise his militant atheism and support of the War on Terror admitted “I have one consistency, which is against the totalitarian… the enemy who tries to get inside your head.”

In time, I rather hope that the ‘Hitch Slap,’ the frequently-employed and entertaining verbal putdown, takes a back seat to the calm and considered way that Hitchens went about his business. Taking eighteen months to die is a miserable and unromantic misfortune, but to do so with courage is the best that can be asked of a man. Hitchens did that, as indeed he had been courageous and ignorant of self-pity for most of his life.

This was a man who collected his mother’s body after her self-murder and channelled the tragedy into his fury at the state of Greece and later Cyprus, who chose to tour his book God Is Not Great not amongst Britain’s middle-class intellectuals, but in America’s Bible Belt, and who not only defended the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but practically agitated for them in a way that was sure to have an affect on his liveihood.

Being called a ‘drink-soaked, former Trotskyist popinjay by George Galloway probably rescued Hitchens from ignominy at one point, but a shrewd marshalling of the facts, a brilliant sense of when to press home the advantage and a not insignificant ego meant that of the many challengers who hoped to best him, and finally convince him of his mistake, few if any went home satisfied.

Had Hitchens lived in some other place, at some other time, his influence could have been radically different. Born an Arab, he may have rotted in a Saudi jail, or been the chief protagonist of the Arab Spring. Active during the French Revolution, he would surely have cavorted with Danton and may have made the equation against Robspierre swing the other way. An upper-middle class Brit, in a country that resembled ‘Weimar without the sex,’ Hitchens was no revolutionary, but always challenging nonetheless. An American citizen for much of his life, he wrote in his biography that ‘the only revolution retaining any verve was the American one.’ This may have made little difference in Egypt, Syria or in Putin’s Russia, but Hitchens’ writing was a corrective to the hypocrisy in American foreign policy that welcomed any ‘son of a bitch, so long as he was our son of a bitch.’ Such a statment would now be virtually unthinkable.

Testimonies from politicians seem strangely out of place, given Hitchens’ anti-political, ideological background. Nonetheless, the debate with Tony Blair in Toronto not so long ago was a watershed in polite, well-informed debate between the religious and the atheistic, and the former Prime Minister played a genuine, well-meaning tribute. Few would believe that the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, had previously interned for Hitchens, but there too was an influence.

There will be many imitators, mostly inferior in language or courage. Johann Hari is one journalist who failed to reach the heights of his hero, and others will smell power or sense themselves to be on unsafe ground and retreat. Yet that ferocious love of liberty will also be coupled with a more generous soul in less gifted individuals and will make the political impulse relevant and vital for another generation at least.

David Cameron’s Felicific Calculus

“It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money and it’s time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB – general well-being.”

David Cameron

“No doubt Cameron will use the index to claim that despite rising unemployment, home repossessions, longer NHS waiting lists and unaffordable education, the people of this country are happier under Tory rule. The reality is a gathering gloom.”

Len McCluskey, General Secretary of UNITE

Like much about David Cameron, the Prime Minister’s recent suggestion that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) should collect data about how happy Britons are has given rise to much mirth and cynicism. However, the proposal is also very like Mr Cameron in that it has clearly been thought through and actually offers no little promise for a shift in political attitudes.

I could quite easily give an essay on Jeremy Bentham’s attempts to create his own happiness index, or Tony Blair’s efforts to introduce his own that were squashed by Civil Servants. None of those themes seem so relevant as the increasing depoliticisation of politics over the past couple of decades. This is as much a Conservative as a Labour theme – Thatcher was by no means averse to claiming that hers was the only way forward, or to locking Britain into the ERM in order to control inflation, and while Conservatives object to the Quangocracy that Labour are alleged to have founded, there is a consensus around the use of independent boards in health (NICE-excluded) and independent school in education.

What Labour and the Liberal Democrats will make of the policy is unclear, however. Undoubtedly, they will criticise it as a means of distorting the public’s attitudes and distracting commentators away from economic concerns, especially if they feel that Keynesianism is beginning to become attractive. Some clever young things will want to get at the mechanics of the policy and will probably score some points but my feeling is that this is a dangerous ground on which to attack. Quite probably, only one of the bigger hitters in the Labour Party could do Mr Cameron any damage and it is a telling fact how few big beasts with even a modicum of public trust or stature remain.

The problem I foresee is that Labour politicians do, or will appear to, fundamentally disagree with the premise of the policy. Mr Cameron’s move, I suspect, is about enhancing his own standing on the liberal end of the Conservative Party and in the centre ground of British politics. He will succeed in the former if some of the areas that he has tried to appropriate from Labour, such as housing, figure largely and in the latter if the public appear to want a little less interference, a lot less immigration and progress in education and health, even if this is at the expense of universal standards.

Both Labour and Conservative politicians have a healthy fear that Britain could become a breeding ground for a movement as instinctive and destructive as the Tea Party in America. However justified they might be, this is no excuse to react passionately and ideologically. It is fairly well documented that in the last few years the book of choice amongst Labour-thinkers has been The Spirit Level. Ed Miliband, in his speech to the National Policy Forum last week opined that people want ‘to get on, but also to live in a strong, fair and equal society.’

Speaking up for equality is something that the Labour Party has done little of in the past decade. Tony Blair, in A Journey as in office, was keener that the Labour Party should not forget that people are aspirational at heart. Mr Blair would have made fairly short work of Mr Cameron’s happiness index, as indeed he did when in office (witness this article published just a few months before he left office in June 2007).

Labour would do well to remember that when Mr Cameron took over the leadership of the Conservative Party he intended to make his party more diverse, more optimistic and greener. When, two years into his tenure, the recession changed the entire political landscape, Mr Cameron had to sacrifice much of his agenda to the economic determinism of George Osborne. As the economic gloom lifts, and it appears that it will do, Mr Cameron will be seeking to re-establish a political agenda that revolves around soft individualism, and, dare I say it, social mobility.

Those on the right of the Conservative Party will criticise the idea that government can increase happiness, suggesting that it does best by doing least. Data collected by government will be sporadic and inconclusive but would most likely represent that tightly-contested ground between individualism and government intervention that characterise aspiration in Britain. I suspect that the grievances of the British public will not be on the scale of the Tea Party or the cahiers of the Third Estate. Then again, as John Lennon found out, people can develop strange ideas about their own desires.

Miliband of Brothers

The mood at the Labour Party Conference is said to be like a wake, with 49.35% of the delegates distraught and a chunk of the other 50.65% concerned that they may have elected the wrong brother. In contrast, today started off as a kind of retirement party, with most feeling that they were too cool to be there, but still prepared to listen kind-heartedly to elder statesmen Jack Straw and Alan Johnson (the latter showing what an eloquent, if unspectacular leader he might have been) before the new leader addressed the class of 2010.

The speech itself compensated for at least some of the speculation and criticism that has diminished the result but there is still an element of shock about Ed Miliband’s victory derived from the momentum of his campaign and the unpreparedness of David Miliband for defeat.

The Machinist

What Ed’s victory does show, for those who care to look, is an ability to position himself politically and the means to employ a formidable machine behind him. Ed learnt on the campaign trail – it seems to have been some time since his declaration speech in which civic empowerment, regulation of the banks and immigration featured strongly. Those themes recurred, up to and including his first leader’s speech, but the more important ones were criticism of the Iraq War, coming out for a living wage and the vehemence of his attack on ‘US-style capitalism’.

There was always an element of ‘stop David’ to Ed’s campaign – not that he necessarily instigated that mood, but he was ruthless enough to capitalise on it. David was discredited by being tied to the War on Terror after he refused to turn his back on the last government’s foreign policy, particularly the Iraq War. Ed sought desparately to nullify Ed Balls and Diane Abbot by stealing their natural constituency in the Trade Unions and did so. He then tacked rightwards in order to convince wavering party members and MPs that he was a credible, centrist candidate for the leadership. Ultimately, there are good reasons for arguing that six MPs swung it.

David, on the other hand, was content to eschew the machine politics that are intrinsic to a party as bureaucratic as Labour and always appeared to be concentrating on the next battle. Set-pieces such as the Keir Hardie lecture or the King Solomon speech (oh, yes) were on a different level to any other in the entire race, but focussed too intently on the next General Election and not on the leadership one. For someone who raised so much money, David seemed determined not to spend it.

What is interesting in these circumstances then, is not so much that Ed won the leadership, but that doing so brought him dangerously close to ruin in his first day as leader. Admittedly, the press resented the defeat of their choice (and The Sun and The Times feature prominently in their caricature of ‘Red Ed’), but a General Election can never be won by moving from the left to the centre ground. If the candidate is not discredited immediately, he appears opportunistic. Moving left from the centre ground is a slightly different matter, as David Miliband’s public profile has suggested. This dangerous label, the uninspiring victory speech and the ghost of his brother put Ed Miliband on the defensive and if he deflected some criticism on the Andrew Marr show, he still had a lot to do today.

The New Labour Playbook and Ed

It was therefore reassuring that Ed’s speech was politically and emotionally sophisticated, (even if it had to be squeezed into the Obama formula of life story, narrative, pragmatism, unity). He has been criticised for ditching the ‘New Labour Playbook,’ but in reality it was always going to be impossible to triangulate when your party is the sole alternative to a coalition that is broadly based.

David Cameron was the first to see that the latest divisions in politics were not between parties but within them and by supporting Blair’s education reforms in 2006 he drove the wedge deeper between Old and New Labour. Ed Miliband appeared to understand this, heaping praise on the old New Labour (contradiction?) positions on law and order and Alistair Darling’s reaction to the financial crisis.

On the one hand, Ed Miliband will find it easy to triangulate on the deficit reduction plan.  But on the other, he had to hug the coalition tight on civil liberties, law and order and welfare reform in order to convince the public that Labour are still the party of ‘hard-fought British liberties’. He did so successfully, for the most part, while also finding space to attack the government for offering defendants in rape trials anonymity and their peculiar attitude to CCTV (which, crucially, also showed that he could tell a joke as well as his brother).

There were also some bold strides either ahead of, or to the left of the coalition, depending on your view. The much-vaunted ‘living wage’ formed a centrepiece, and the EU Agency Directive and ‘good society’ also got mentions. The ‘good society’ may sound like a neat counterpart to David Cameron’s big society, but with Ed as with every other activist who likes that term, I wonder if they know what they mean by it, and worry that they do.

One thing that Ed Miliband is very keen on is equality (The Spirit Level is appearently outselling even Ralph Miliband tomes at Conference – no word on A Journey). In this, he ought to be careful. As Tony Blair puts it, Labour needs to ‘get’ (another Ed-ism) aspiration. Ed’s associates, notably Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley, see left of centre-majorities as low-hanging fruit and both the impending fiscal tightening and the referendum on Alternative Vote (which won Ed the leadership) will encourage this tendency. On the contrary, Labour will have to fight hard for its reputation and landing blows on the government is only half the battle. The Party is unlikely to have an easy road back to power and will have to challenge itself before the public finds it fit for purpose.

Ed’s Long Shadow

All of which brings us to the Shadow Cabinet. There are two scenarios which will hugely influence Ed’s freedom to choose his team, and David is not the major player. Instead, the key will be the performance of Ed Balls and whether he floats or flops. Balls got approximately eighty first or second preference votes from MPs, suggesting that he will top the poll (unless David stands). If there are any notable shifts in voting in Balls favour, this will strengthen his claim to have an anti-cuts majority in the party and therefore close in on the Shadow Chancellor’s position.

It is in Miliband’s interests to have Balls onside, but Yvette Cooper has an eye for detail that would make her a surer touch in a very unstable playing field. Miliband has also suggested that he would prefer an emollient Home Affairs spokesperson who ‘gets’ civil liberties. Balls is soundest when on the attack, and Health would therefore be a very suitable post for his talents, given that it is an area in which the government is divided (the Lansbury reforms). Getting him to take a portfolio other than the Shadow Chancellor will be the first challenge for Ed Miliband. The second will be stomaching a handful of Blairite ministers, preferably at Education and Welfare and Pensions.

Andrew Rawnsley on Labour’s Brown and Outs

The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley (2010)

Four weeks is a long time in politics – eight years, in fact, by the time I had finished Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of The Party. The book has had its fair share of attention more because it is the first to shed any light on Gordon Brown’s brief premiership, but it purports to be no less than a thorough history of the rise and fall of New Labour – with a notable emphasis on decline.

Rawnsley is a political animal of the soap-opera school of thinking, and End of the Party bears that motif. His history is more a series of events tracking the rise and fall of different factions like a financial index, but he does seek to explore four things; the conflict between Blair and Brown and its effect on the government, the lack of radical change in policy, the impact of Iraq, and the failure of Brown’s (so far) brief premiership.

The Blair/Brown conflict takes up by far the majority of the book, revelling in the increasing nastiness and numerous short-lived agreements and schedules for the handover. In tandem lies an equally important story of Blair’s political death within the Labour Party – graceful, in hindsight, but driven by the repeated offence caused to MPs by education reforms, support for Israel in the Lebanon war, the Cash for Honours affair and ultimately exploited by Brown’s circle (one of the remarkable things about the book is how large the concentric rings around the key players can be). So much is well known, but in less detail than here.

More important is the paralysis caused by the constant warring between the dual-premiers. On some issues, Rawnsley is happy to call it for Brown (such as his veto of Euro-entry) but public service reform evidently suffered. One thing that comes out of Rawnsley’s is his ability to personify different political positions and he is exercised by the manner in which Alan Milburn was chewed up and spat out twice (he left the Health Department in 2003 after compromise was made on Foundation Hospitals and the Cabinet Office’s overseer role in 2005).

Another ghost over the New Labour legacy is Frank Field, who after being told to ‘think the unthinkable’ on welfare reform, was sacrificed for doing precisely that. He pops up several times, most notably protesting Gordon Brown’s decision to scrap the lowest rate of income tax.

Nonetheless, there are happier stories to tell on Northern Ireland and University Fees. Blair is clearly an impressive figure for the author, in the same way that he was for Adam Boulton in Memories of the Blair Administration. The clarity of times past certainly suggests a more coherent and focused figure than came across. Unfortunately, End of the Party does not nail down a legacy in the same way that Peter Riddell’s much better The Unfulfilled Prime Minister does and it is a real weakness that any assessment of what New Labour means/meant is confined to a few pages at the climax. Expect a longer afterword when the paperback comes out in August.

Iraq is almost too exhausting a subject to consider, but it is actually one of Rawnsley’s strengths. The author gives a good overview of the build-up to the war, where Blair was motivated by the belief that America could not be trusted to go it alone; the fatal lack of planning, mostly the fault of the complacent secrecy of the Pentagon and the ways in which Blair presented it. The whole affair exhausted Blair and made him increasingly vulnerable to being cuckolded by Brown and his Cabinet colleagues, even though successive enquiries have largely failed to criticise the government’s actions.

If Blair is an impressive and attractive figure, Rawnsley’s dislike of Brown is extraordinary. Much as the writers of No Expense Spared (on last summer’s exposé of the ways MPs abused their Parliamentary expenses emphasised Brown’s unresponsiveness and near-fatal handling of the crisis, Rawnsley lacerates the Prime Minister’s political antennae and support. Brown is presented as an intellectual figure, but one who struggles to understand the ramifications of his policies and who above all else, had no plan for power. Beset by a series of unfortunate events (the 10p tax debacle after his last budget, the banking crisis, the recession, expenses, criticism of the Afghanistan war and Brown’s support for the military and the resignations surrounding last year’s council elections), between which came a few successes such as support for industry and the financial sector and the G20’s international response to the crisis.

Mostly, however, praise is bestowed on Brown’s Chancellor, Alistair Darling. Chancellor’s and Prime Ministers almost always clash ands that institutional logic is displayed in the way in which Brown went from constantly denying Blair additional spending to demanding increasingly large amounts from the Treasury. The money had been drying up for years when stimulation of the economy became necessary, so the Conservative’s focus on the politics of the budget deficit was a canny strategy, which Brown seems not only to have not foreseen, but won’t accept (which he should do, regardless of the economic logic).

Rawnsley tells us that New Labour was erected on five pillars that have now been called into question;

• Blair’s instinct for presentation and positioning,
• Growing prosperity
• An unattractive opposition
• Investment in public services
• A promise of change and modernisation.

Labour have certainly lost the first two, or at least so it seems. They still go into this election promising change of a sort and with their stance on income tax largely unquestioned (despite having raised the top rate to 50%, unthinkable just a few years ago). The lack of enthusiasm for public service reform, as opposed to investment, is now coming to bite as the money is not there to promise. As Blair once presciently warned, it is not enough to love the Labour bit. His party had to learn the ‘new’ bit. This election is being fought in the now, but it remains to be seen if anyone is willing to resurrect New Labour, or if it is indeed the end of Blair’s party.

Michael Foot

It is true, or true enough, that all political lives end in failure. Michael Foot was no exception – indeed, like Enoch Powell, who enunciated that terribly appropriate phrase, Foot was dragged below the waves after failing to notice the famous ‘sea change’ in public opinion.

Foot was a poor politician, if truth be told. He realised all too late that he had given too many wage increases to the Unions without returns, though the minimum wage was a commitment he handed down. His disarmament campaign was never as sound as it was passionate and he never put in the effort required to keep the Gang of Four in the Labour Party.

Indeed, Roy Hattersley remembers him obsessing more over criticism of a friend’s literary endeavour at the time. Harold Wilson told Roy Jenkins that he could be a semi-detached member of the government. In the increasingly radical Labour Party in Opposition, Foot had no such choice, something suggested in his rueful quotation of Hamlet when asked about his leadership of so difficult a political movement;

“Cursed spite that ever I was asked to put it right.”

Loyalty was central to Foot’s outlook, but he otherwise stood an inscrutable gap between love of and obsession with politics. He devoted his life to it but there were always higher values than electoral popularity.

Foot, born in 1913, came from an age and a party that was a campaigning movement, an insurgency rather than a natural government. Typically, the 1983 manifesto, for which Foot was both famed and blamed, contained all of the resolutions passed by the Labour Conference. As his biographer, Kenneth Morgan has described him;

‘He saw himself in the great line of descent of English radicalism, from the Levellers to the Independent Labour Party. It was a patchy and partisan, but very usable, past.”

He could not, in other words, be more different from New Labour, for which modernisation has come to be dogma, and perpetual government the cause. However, something should be said of the inspiration he provided to a new generation of politicians. Blair et al remained in the Labour Party through the SDP years, and Foot remained grateful, saying;

“No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist.” (Guardian)

The radicalism of 1983 is greater in hindsight and comparison with Thatcherism. Foot stood for maintenance of the fabled consensus, government by bargaining. Today the government is expected to be all-powerful – a key legacy of Thatcher. Labour’s 1983 manifesto was all about Keynesian stimulation of the economy – less shocking now than three years ago. And the ‘inverterate peacemongerer’ could be more pragmatic than he was given credit for. He praised the good done by the Labour government that was elected in 1997 and wrote that “the West will have to do more than bomb Serbia in order to stop the genocidal activities of its leaders.”

Michael Foot was Labour to his bones, despite a Liberal background. He combined nonconformist passion with revulsion at misfortune, poverty and disadvantage. Politics to him was a pragmatic creed. He was to political theorists what journalists are to political theorists, and his own words speak testament to that;

“We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves.

“That is our only certain good and great purpose on Earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer ‘To hell with them.’ The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.” (AP)

N.B. These wonderful words were also Foot’s – from his foreword to the 1983 Manifesto. I couldn’t work them in, nor leave them out.

“So let’s put a stop to defeatism, and put a stop too to all those sermons about Victorian values. The labour movement – the Labour Party and the trade unions acting together – came into being, as one of our poets, Idris Davies, said, to end ‘the long Victorian night’. It was a fight to introduce civilised standards into the world of ruthless, devil-take-the-hindmost individualism.

Particularly after our 1945 victory, when Labour had a majority, we set to work creating a real community in which the strong would come to the aid of the weak, in which the profit test would have to make way for the human test.”

The Great Offices of State

Just as the BBC is busy dismembering itself for the gratification of the political class, it produces a series of programmes that are a perfectly poised mix of investigations and polemic. The Great Offices of State is pithy and insightful, intelligent and utterly polite. No one does reminiscence quite so well, and Michael Cockerell is a formidable interviewer.

The three episodes cover the Home Office, the Treasury and the Foreign Office respectively. Each are delightfully idiosyncratic, and the mix of political and mandarin opinion highlights those problems which are unique to each, but there is also a larger story at work – the decline of these great ministries. Although hardly unremarked upon, the scale of the challenge that is presented by the outdatedness of Britain’s civil service is rarely so well exposed.

The Foreign Office – Diplodocus

The Foreign Office’s attitude to ministerial direction is described by one civil servant as “like an oyster regards a grain of grit… an irritant with a slim probability of producing a pearl.” It has perhaps the most mixed record, with triumphs like the negotiation of accession to the EC in 1972 juxtaposed with Suez and the cathartic end of Empire. It is often said that the Foreign Office lost an Empire and never quite found a role, but in truth it’s fate was to be rather swamped by the weight of European business – to the obvious distaste of those mandarins unused to European ways of working.

Perhaps the biggest downgrading of the Foreign Office has happened under the Blair administration, despite Jack Straw’s recent assertions of his potency (if only he had had a professional interest in resigning, he might well have done it in 2003, as implied here and in the Chilcott Inquiry). Blair has been the most internationally-minded Prime Minister since Eden and his personal involvement in Northern Ireland, Europe and American relations, not to mention Iraq directly, has been at the expense of the Foreign Office. Another factor is that the Office is necessarily diplomatic, which means a limited influence in times of war when contrasted with the forces.

The Home Office – Not Fit For Purpose

The Home Office has long been a political graveyard for Ministers because of its ability (in the words of Roy Jenkins) to spring disasters from the blue. The last ten years have shown that amply in the careers of both Jacqui Smith and Charles Clarke (who still resents his departure). Others have been luckier. Jack Straw told Cockerell that when he came into office the asylum backlog stood at over 100,000 incomplete cases. When John Reid became Home Secretary in 2005, the number was close to 500,000.

It was Reid who set in motion the division of the Office into its current remit and the Justice Ministry, which deals with prisons, the courts and probation, while the Home Office returns to something more akin to its original function of protecting public law and order. Still, it is regarded as a bitterly cynical department. Blair’s Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, remembers a presentation back in 1997; crime would be going up because the economy was growing, which meant more things to steal. What if the economy were to be going down, then, asked Powell. In that case, crime would go up, because there would be more people to steal things!

But the Home Office highlights better than any department just how limited the leverage most Ministers have when it comes to enacting policy. The tools at the disposal of the criminal justice system are far removed from the main offices on Marsham Street. The last Home Secretary to be regarded as setting the tone for his brief, Roy Jenkins, did so almost exclusively through legislation (repealing censorship, the criminalisation of homosexuality and the death penalty – the latter very probably because he wanted to replace the board that charts the progress of each death row inmate with a drinks cabinet). But legislation has only a limited effect on policing, probation, and the administrative nightmare that is immigration processing for example.

The Treasury – Gladstonian Revival

The Treasury is still largely recognisable as the department it was before 1997, with one exception. The decision to grant independence to the Bank of England has meant that control over interest rates has been given up. That means that it is less the Thatcherite department of monetary supply, and more the Gladstonian department of taxation, spending and balanced budgets. As we have seen in Alistair Darling, the Chancellor’s close relationship with the City means that with an element of boldness he can still take on the Prime Minister from a position of authority. The same was true, of course, of Lawson when it came to the ERM, before Thatcher wielded the axe.

The Treasury was also fleshed out by Gordon Brown’s Chancellorship, during which it attempted to play the role of a department for the combating of poverty. Some of that influence has been lost, but the current promotion of tax credits instead of benefits gives it a decided edge over the Work and Pensions brief.

New Labour and the Decline of the Office of State

In several ways New Labour has directly exacerbated the decline felt in these Departments. The first is the haphazard way in which devolution and freedom of information has been handled, depriving mandarins of considerable influence. The second is Prime Ministerial leadership. Blair was a particularly involved Prime Minister in many ways. He would go over the heads of his Ministers to the public, guaranteeing standards, promising targets and focussing on results – David Blunkett remembers his leader promising cuts in immigration without consulting his Home Secretary.

The redoubtable historian of the civil service, Peter Hennessy, substantiates Blair’s influence in his book, The Prime Minister; The Office and Its Holders Since 1945. Blair, he feels, veered dangerously close to both establishing a Prime Minister’s Department on top of the old architecture of Whitehall and of trying to force joined-up government without following the proper route through the Cabinet Office. Indeed, it was only as an audit trail that Cabinet was truly significant – most relationships were bilateral, and largely to the benefit of the Prime Minister. The other factor was that with Brown, Blair had a largely dual-Premiership in which each had spheres of influence.

It is a great shame that Hennessy looks unlikely to update The Prime Ministers beyond the 2001 cut-off. Indeed, there was a rush of good analysis in the early years of the Blair administration, which was never carried through into analysis of the political successes and failures of New Labour.

What seems clear insofar as the three so-called great offices of state are concerned, is that issues like crime, the economy and diplomacy will still be contentious. Indeed, they all look like potential election-winners. Whether New Labour’s reforms will lead to greater efficiency or politicisation of the civil service will see meddling preventing the incubation of policy, the institutional levers Ministers have at their disposal are already under scrutiny. The devolution of public services – Academies and Primary Care Trusts – was a key component of Blair’s last years in office. It may continue after an election, in which case the departments will be further truncated. But it may also depend where the strong Ministers are.

So Long, Blairwell

Memories of the Blair Administration; Tony’s Ten Years, by Adam Boulton

For a very brief two years, Tony Blair was almost forgotten in Britain. Gordon Brown’s premiership was the dominant political story and Blair was away from the daily accountability to the media that British politics make unavoidable. Suddenly, Blair’s bid for the EU Presidency and the apparent fatality of Labour’s fourth term have put Blair in the spotlight. The Sky News anchor, Adam Boulton, hasn’t taken his eye off the story, so that his account, though it certainly isn’t the first, and surely won’t be the last, is timely.

Boulton structures his narrative around the ‘Blairwell tour’ – the Prime Minister’s attempt to highlight his own achievements through a departure schedule of speeches, meetings and summits. Unlike most of the public, Boulton was relatively admiring of the Blair’s victory lap. They had been on a long journey together, as the comely title suggests, and Blair had dominated the political scene in a way that did not just play to his strengths as Thatcher had, but had constantly disorientated the opposition.

Moreoever, as Boulton clearly feels, the exit was classic Blair. In a typical display of imperviousness, the Prime Minister shrugged off the constraints that he had placed on himself, and in turn had been enforced on him by backbench rebellions. Further, he did so in a way that genuinely cemented a policy agenda; securing a deal on the EU budget to unfreeze France’s Common Agricultural Policy; keeping troops in Iraq to complement the US surge, and ensuring that Public Finance Initiatives (PFIs) and Academies continued to revolutionise the delivery of public health and education.

The story was, and still is, unfinished. Blair is a Statesman without a State, behind him so many wasted years and the wish he had gone further, and in front of him nothing certain – two well-intentioned foundations, a fragile international role and a reputation that is still to be secured. Boulton gives the impression that Blair is closer to where his instincts are, but pet projects are no substitute for achievement for a man who has held executive office.

A History Yet To Be Written

Boulton is hardly one-sided, but the EU Presidency affair has shown the limits of Blair’s powers. There are a whole host of questions still to be asked of Blair’s career, most of which Boulton serves to highlight, rather than answer.

First, what was the ultimate effect of Blair’s announcement that he would not seek a fourth term? Clearly, it put the third term constantly on edge, and much as commentators have tried to resolve the issue, it has never quite been answered.

Secondly, there is a question over Blair’s style. Peter Hennessy is perhaps the foremost historian of British government today, but he has never studied beyond the wasted energies of the first term. Two things stand out from Boulton’s account. Blair was the most presidential of Prime Ministers. He disliked the legislature and sidelined the Cabinet, though he always kept it well-stocked in ‘Big Beasts’. But given the sheer amount of law that made it onto the statute book, was it really the case that New Labour governed poorly?

The answer may lie in Blair’s upper middle-class penchant for self-abasement, so brilliantly captured by the ‘Yo Blair!’ episode. What is no longer remembered is the more important part of the conversation – where Blair offered to sacrifice his credibility in the Middle East to give Condoleeza Rice the opportunity to make a deal. Blair sacrificed an awful lot in his ten years, and failed to cover his core base. Some commentators say Blair killed triangulation, others interpret his whole career in that fashion. Certainly, the last word has yet to be written about the ‘Third Way’.

Another question that seems particularly resonant today is the degree to which New Labour’s naivety impeded its efforts to govern, at least for the first term. Preparation for government has become increasingly crucial as ambitions and bureaucracy grows. New Labour were underprepared when they came to power, and promised more tangible objects than any government before. The result was a plausibility gap.

The other New Labour preoccupation was the media. Boulton is understandably keen to defend his side and in any case, he believes that it was Alistair Campbell’s one-man-war on the press that so discredited Blair.

Memories of the Blair Administration is unsurprisingly journalistic in style. That need not be an insult. As Timothy Garton Ash has observed, journalists and academics like to use each others professions as insults, but interesting facts need to be taken to their full conclusion. There is a lot of history still to be written about the Blair Administration, something that the Iraq War Inquiry is doing as we speak.

The Blair Ultimatum

All the words needlessly spilt over this week’s controversy have turned up very few interesting arguments – either for or against – the prospect of Tony Blair becoming the first EU president.  In fact, most have been very bad, and the obsession with a British perspective has only obstructed intelligent debate.  It doesn’t much matter that Blair is from Britain, even though we are at times out of step with some European initiatives, and even though the next British government may be even more Eurosceptic.  Neither should politics be so important.  I’ve heard it said that pressure for a centre-right candidate is behind Merkel’s reluctance.  But what is Blair, if not a Christian democrat? Frankly, both his ideology and his contacts are secondary to his profile and his abilities.

There are two things working against Blair.   One is an almost visceral dislike of him, more as a person than as a professional.  Take this ridiculous article from Jeff Randall;

‘Mr Blair is a fake, a charlatan, a shameless twister. He is not “a pretty straight sort of guy”. Who else would play down his faith lest it be seen as a vote-loser?’

Most accuse Blair of free-loading, or jumping on the EU gravy train, as Randall puts it.  This argument is patently absurd.  If Blair were to take a role in the EU he would inevitably sacrifice a far more significant portion of his current income than he could possibly gain directly from the job, as perhaps the one decent article on the subject has made clear.  For a start, there’s the £2m annual salary from JP Morgan.  Then there’s the speaking engagements and consultancies.  Money has nothing to do with it.

Personal attacks are not rare in politics, but the only worthwhile ones concentrate on a candidate’s suitability for the role.  No one opposed to a Blair presidency has yet faced up to the question of how effective he would actually be.  Some views, admittedly, are based on his actions in office, but almost exclusively examples have little or no relation to the job that he would actually be doing.

This leads me nicely to the second argument against Blair, that he would be divisive.  It is ridiculous that Iraq is still so contentious, especially amongst European socialists, six and a half years after the event.  Blair’s pro-European endeavours – common defence, the social chapter, pro-active engagement – have all been forgotten.  And in a sense, joint military engagement has now been so decisively removed from the agenda that it should be easier to ignore the elephant in the room than it actually appears.

Blair is a natural diplomat.  His engagement with the gritty details in Palestine will only have added to his natural charm.  He managed the transition in British diplomacy from Clinton to Bush effortlessly, so the argument that his appointment might send a hostile signal to Obama is nonsensical.

The trouble is that Iraq exposed how disunited Europe really was, and the concern is that too vigorous a president might do so again.  The question then, is really about the kind of president Europe wants.  There has been some discussion about the two possible ways this could turn out. 

The bureaucrat would chair summits and make sure that the EU was well-administered.  There is no denying that Blair would be unsuitable for this role, and yet the right-wing critics, who seem the most vociferous in this country at least, would be ill-served by this model.  It would almost certainly mean more European government, and the status-quo, including the Common Agricultural Policy.

Blair is suited to the second model.  The virtue of his candidacy is that he could be a diplomat, without being diplomatic.  He would effectively represent the EU outside of its borders, but would also offer initiative.  Critics of his government have often said that there were too many initiatives, but it is a style that would suit the needs of the EU, where balancing interests is a pre-eminent concern.  Inevitably, it would involve banging heads together, but Blair has the right instincts on climate change, aid, and dare I say it, the Middle East to make Europe a big player.

Very few people inside the EU have yet gone on the record about Blair’s chances.  The latest is that Sarkozy and Merkel, who were very keen, are now holding back their support.  Momentum is important in decisions like these, but there is no explicit campaign, so the wider concerns have their place too.  These might still sway the decision-makers.

Still, I find it peculiar that, as the BBC is reporting, a three-man panel is in place to decide.  Bigger names will surely have a proportionate say, but the doubts of one of that panel, the Austrian Chancellor Werner Fayman, put Blair at a disadvantage.

Belatedly and exceptionally, some reasonable articles about Blair from The Economist’s David Rennie;

Blair – a moderate

The politics and the disappointment

The Nobel Peace Prize

The Norwegian committee that decided to award this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama may have thought they were making a populist choice.  They were wrong.  Howls of derision are ringing out.  This is the first time since 1976 that the award has so flagrantly ignored results and so deliberately sought to encourage nascent progress. 

Indeed, it is hard to ignore the fact that Obama was nominated – as a matter of necessity – less than a month into his presidency.  That Obama’s election was a triumph for the progress of race relations in the United States is not in question, everyone agrees.  However, this award is in danger of making him a token, and further enraging the conservative elements in American politics that resent his neat public image and alleged discreet socialism.

And yet, it is doubtful that the Nobel Committee were so naïve.  It is just about possible to construct an argument for Obama, although it is a blatantly political and in some ways logically dubious one.  The argument, I think, runs something like this.

“The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

It is easy to forget the role that nuclear weapons still play in our society.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union, they have been almost entirely irrelevant to the public consciousness.  But it would be as foolish to write the history of our times without reference to the bomb as it would to ignore its central role in the Cold War. 

The Iraq war was based on the premise that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction.  The pretext was Saddam’s refusal to allow UN inspectors full access to his country, and admittedly faulty evidence that Saddam was interested in plutonium from Niger.  That has since been obscured by six-years of conventional warfare, and accusations of duplicity.  Tony Blair was, I think, fundamentally honest when he described what he foresaw as the defining issue of  21st Century international relations;

“The threat is chaos. And there are two begetters of chaos. Tyrannical regimes with WMD and extreme terrorist groups who profess a perverted and false view of Islam.”

The latter of those two has come to be seen as more dominant, and it is the reason that Obama will almost certainly seek, through force, a conclusion to the war in Afghanistan.  But surveying the world in 2009, nuclear weapons, or weapons of mass destruction are of pressing concern.  North Korea has tested nuclear weapons, and Obama’s decision to reveal secret intelligence about Iran’s nuclear programme put President Ahmadinejad on the back foot.  The prospect of either of these nations achieving nuclear capability would undoubtedly create a new proliferation crisis, as neighbours rushed to arm themselves in defence.  The danger of so many contradictory policies of deterrent is grave.

That is why President Obama has sought a UN Resolution on non-proliferation, while stressing that the target was a world without nuclear weapons.  The document itself resolves virtually nothing, except to remain alert to these concerns.  It reaffirms a good deal, particularly the Non-Proliferation and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaties, but is essentially a statement, devoid of a decisive context.  In short, it achieves little.

“Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics.”

Thus, it is necessary to look elsewhere for progress.  The Nobel Committee implicitly argues in favour of two of Obama’s foreign policy instruments – his use of diplomacy, and the store he sets in multilateral institutions.  There is meat on the former, but whether the latter bears fruit remains to be seen.

Relations with Russia are a particular positive for Obama.  Since ‘pressing the reset button,’ negotiations have begun on reducing nuclear arms in the two countries (not a very significant gain in terms of non-proliferation because the threat is limited and Russian stocks are deteriorating, but superficially and financially helpful nonetheless) and, most importantly, Russia has begun to show signs that it will abide by sanctions on Iran.  That raises the prospect of greater collaboration, that the dilemma of 2003 can be avoided, but it does not guarantee it.

This year has been a multilateral year in many ways.  The meetings of the G20, in the shadow of the recession, have set a precedent in two respects.  Firstly, it has confirmed the expansion of the ‘club’, which decides on the world economy from the seven largest economies plus Russia, to a group that includes the most important developing nations.  Secondly, the collective response to the recession was choreographed, and significantly included more money and a greater respectability for the IMF, another multilateral body. 

If there is a serious headline achievement at Copenhagen on Climate Change, Obama will be able to refer to his grand speech at the UN, where he declared that “We have reached a pivotal moment”, where

“the United States stands ready to begin a new chapter of international co-operation – one that recognises the rights and responsibilities of all nations” and cite a response. 

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

Obama’s foreign policy team believe in something called ‘quantity theory’.  Essentially, small but high profile successes culminate into influence, meaning the quantity of power steadily increases.  The presidency began with the (wholly symbolic) closure of Guantanamo Bay and the (slightly more consequential) ban on torture in the US army.  Then came the well-received Cairo speech, and in August there was progress as Benjamin Netanyahu accepted a two-state solution and negotiations began on the settlements, although there was no Peace Plan to be unveiled at the UN.

Most recently came Obama’s UN speech itself, which was underrated, or at least crowded out by other news.  While he did not make it obvious how he was going to deal with every issue, Obama said several important things.  He pointed to four pillars, which were

“fundamental to the future we would like for our children; non-proliferation and disarmament; the promotion of peace and security; the preservation of our planet; and a global economy that advances opportunity for all people.“ 

He also spoke of the importance of human rights, and addressed head-on the concern that while

“the United Nations does extraordinary good around the world feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, mending places that have been broken… it also struggles to enforce its will, and to live up to the ideals of its founding.”

In part, there was little need to descriptive plans or schedules.  The point was to highlight areas for action, and open them up to collective action.  That may not be successful in the long run, but unwillingness to collaborate with America proved to be an obstacle during the Bush years. 

Should the reaction to it hold positive, the Nobel award adds prestige to Obama’s new strategy for engagement with the world.  It is to be hoped that it will reduce the regional sway of men like Ahmadeinejad and Chavez and commit the rest of the world, rather than just America to a particular course. 

Challenges are inevitable.  The disastrous demonstration against the Iranian election was dispiriting, there is every chance that Russia will remain as belligerent in its near-abroad, and China, Burma and Zimbabwe may continue to repress the human rights of their own citizens.  But should Obama’s strategy produce results, they will trump many of the individual contributions that have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before.