Dear Gordon,

Last week I wrote you a seasonal greeting, recommending some new year resolutions of self-denial. In this second half of the message, I will take the liberty of suggesting some non-economic issues where self-denying ordinances could improve the outlook for your Government in the year ahead.

The most important function of government is foreign policy and defence. It is also the field where the benefits of self-restraint are most apparent. Few people doubt any longer that both the country and the Labour Government would have been better off if Tony Blair had shown more restraint over Iraq and his so-called War on Terror. One of the most intelligent decisions you made as soon as you became Prime Minister was to stop flattering and legitimising the madmen of al-Qaeda by romanticising their mass murders as a “war”.

Sadly, however, your self-restraint did not go beyond such semantic changes. Your other big idea in foreign last year — the appointment of Lord Malloch-Brown as deputy foreign secretary - was designed for a similar symbolic purpose. You spun this appointment as a gesture of defiance towards the Bush Administration, hoping to win kudos from the British public. But you then assured Washington privately that Lord Malloch-Brown would have no influence whatsoever in the one area that mattered to the White House - the Middle East. Needless to say, this gimmickry backfired.

If we ignore such gestures and look back over last year, you remained as much an agent as Mr Blair of President Bush's foreign policy. Not only did you fail to signal a change of course by announcing a withdrawal from Iraq, like the Italian, Spanish, Australian, Polish and Japanese governments. You also continued to back US military threats towards Iran, insisting that “nothing is ruled out” when asked about British participation in American bombing raids, rejecting proposals for direct US negotiations with Tehran. The predictable result was that Britain got the worst of both worlds: our foreign policy continued to be made in Washington, but we no longer enjoyed any special influence over Mr Bush.

In the year ahead, there is a simple way to improve this dire situation: you must state publicly that Britain will pull its soldiers out of Basra and will oppose any military attack by either America or Israel on Iran. The logical consequence of such a policy would be to encourage broad-based negotiations with Iran and also with Hamas, preferably in conjunction with the EU. In the meantime you could transform your domestic and international standing by firmly ruling out any further Middle Eastern military adventures, but continuing the peacemaking process in Afghanistan.

Speaking of Afghanistan, there is another self-denying ordinance you should uphold: acknowledge that you cannot win the war against drugs. As long as British soldiers are trying to eradicate opium poppies, their presence will strengthen the Taleban. Only by accepting that farmers in Afghanistan are as entitled to grow opium as the farmers of Turkey or Virginia are to grow tobacco — and by making arrangements to buy up their crops at higher prices than the opium traders can afford - will the Western coalition make any headway in winning Afghan hearts and minds.

The other great issues of foreign policy this year will be the European constitution — and here again a self-denying ordinance would serve you well. You promised in your manifesto to hold a referendum on the constitution. If you squirm out of this by simply changing its name to “treaty”, your promises will never be trusted again. There is, however, an honourable alternative to such semantic wriggling: stop imagining that you alone must carry the burden of this decision and allow a free vote in Parliament on whether the treaty should be immediately ratified or submitted to a plebiscite. A free vote to ratify would be a genuine exercise in parliamentary sovereignty. And if Parliament decided the treaty was genuinely a matter of constitutional importance, then you could organise a referendum with no loss of face and no presumption that the public would vote “no”. Either way, your personal credibility would be enormously enhanced by an achievement that has eluded all your predecessors since Harold Wilson: you would have settled the European issue for a generation.

Respect for the British constitution is another area to improve your standing through self-restraint. Your own law officers have told you that there is no need to extend pre-charge detention. You face a political nightmare in pushing this legislation through Parliament. To end this nightmare, you have only to pinch yourself and wake up: announce that this legislation is no longer needed and the ordeal will be over.

You should do exactly the same with the ruinously costly national ID card scheme. The data management fiascos have proved that government cannot cope with more information. Nobody has given a convincing argument for a national ID scheme - and anyway, you will incite a revolution if you try to force the British to carry compulsory identity cards like the Germans and French. You may believe that you have no alternative but to carry on with a programme to which you are publicly committed. But if you are banging your head against a brick wall, there is always an alternative: stop doing it.

This brings me, finally, to a much smaller, but electorally suicidal, issue that will cripple you politically even if your Government performs well in other respects: the expansion of Heathrow airport. The pros and cons of airport expansion can be discussed elsewhere; suffice it to say that London has Britain's largest concentration of marginal seats and that Heathrow is in completely the wrong place to become a vast international hub for British Airways.

Moreover, such a hub would be neither in the national interest nor in the interest of shareholders in BA. In any case, the detailed arguments are irrelevant. If you persist in trying to build a third Heathrow runway you will lose every marginal seat in London - and that alone will probably be enough to guarantee a general election defeat. Again the solution is obvious: just do nothing. Or if you must do something, then take the economically sensible course: break up the BAA monopoly, forcing Heathrow to compete against Stansted and Gatwick. This will solve the congestion problem far more quickly than any centrally imposed Whitehall plan.

You may be surprised that this letter has not even mentioned education, health and equality, the issues that you care about most. But I have been writing about what you should not do. You may claim genuine vision for transforming Britain's social services in the long term. But what you can achieve before the next general election is limited. Unless you can lay to rest the doubts about your Government's competence, honesty and ability to respond to unexpected events, your long-term vision for Britain's public services will remain just a vision. As Keynes said, we are all dead in the long run - and for any politician, mortality looms at the next election.

Happy New Year,

Anatole

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