It is not often that one has the opportunity to correct a misjudgment which is more than 40 years old. It must be even rarer to be able to make the correction in the same newspaper. On July 13, 1962, the day before my 34th birthday, Harold Macmillan dismissed seven members of his cabinet, including Lord Kilmuir, the long-standing conservative lord chancellor. He replaced them with younger men to rejuvenate his government.

Macmillan was much distressed by the process of dismissing so many of his old colleagues; he found it so painful that he had to retreat to the lavatory which adjoins the Cabinet Room where he was physically sick. He became so confused that when Sir Gerald Kelly, president of the Royal Academy, called on a courtesy visit, the prime minister asked him to become president of the Board of Trade.

As a young man I naturally thought that the promotion of young men must be a good idea, particularly as the new members of the cabinet included a couple of my personal friends. I therefore wrote a laudatory article in The Sunday Times, arguing that this bold reshuffle would make the Macmillan administration more useful, up-to-date and modern. I soon found that I was the only person in the country who thought that, except the prime minister himself.

A few days later he congratulated me on being the only journalist to have understood his reshuffle; in truth, I was the only journalist to fall for his spin. Jeremy Thorpe, not yet leader of the Liberal party, made a more accurate comment: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.”

No prime minister since then has risked repeating the political disaster of Macmillan’s night of the long knives. I suppose Tony Blair was only a nine-year-old when Macmillan made the last totally disastrous reshuffle. Yet he has repeated the double-headed mistake of panicking and of letting the public see his panic.

To be fair to Macmillan, Blair’s reshuffle is much the worst of the two. It is, indeed, not so large, but it contains at least as many personal misjudgments. In each of the three main cabinet promotions the minister coming in is less capable than the one going out. Given a free choice, no judge of human potential would prefer Lord Falconer to Lord Irvine, John Reid to Alan Milburn or Peter Hain to Reid.

Nobody doubts that Charles Falconer is a more clubbable man than Derry Irvine. However, he is nothing like as forceful a personality. The prime minister has something of a weakness for bullies, which is usually a sign of a flawed temperament. Falconer is not one of them but, of the original band of new Labour brothers, Gordon Brown, Irvine, Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson can all be regarded as bullies.

Irvine is an intellectual bully. He overawes people partly by his overbearing manner, but partly by his intellectual grip. Falconer is a much kindlier man and a persuasive speaker, but he has a less formidable intellect. No peer has ever been frightened of arguing against Falconer; it is no more frightening than an afternoon’s tennis in Hampstead. Irvine turns it into the Centre Court at Wimbledon.

Milburn knew a good deal about health and had formed a policy that bore some relation to Blair’s original 1997 promise to reform the National Health Service. Reid has little or no experience of the problems of the health service. He is the government’s enforcer and pops from place to place whenever there is a job of enforcing to do. At health, a clever bully has replaced a minister in charge of his brief.

For some reason Blair likes to promote ministers who have recently mishandled their previous portfolios. Reid comes fresh from his gaffe about “rogue elements” in the intelligence service, which made the still unresolved Iraq war issues even harder to handle. Hain comes from his disastrous mismanagement of the Brussels convention, which has left many critical issues to be reversed — or left to rot — at the forthcoming intergovernmental conference.

Hain is also the inventor of no fewer than three fraudulent and anti-democratic arguments against a British referendum on the European constitution. He is a less capable leader of the House than his two predecessors, less intellectual than Reid and less charming than Robin Cook.

To all appearances the cabinet now is weaker than it was a week ago. It appears to have been cobbled together. Yet the constitutional changes are far more important and even less defensible. With no public discussion and no consultation, Scotland, Wales, the judiciary, the legal system and the House of Lords have all been thrown into the pot.

The proposed reconstruction of the legal system is outrageous, not because its proposals are unthinkable but because they have not been properly discussed. Irvine’s letter of resignation implies that he is critical of the proposals in their present form and fears their impact on the independence of the judiciary. Falconer comes into office with the crippling presumption that he is pre-committed to these first thoughts from Downing Street. He has been deprived of the assumption that he is his own man, coming to these arguments with an open mind.