THIS GOVERNMENT now resembles a flagging soap opera whose writers feel impelled to pack so many melodramatic storylines into each episode that viewers are forced to stay tuned. Not that the contents of yesterday’s front pages were devised by spin-doctors — far from it. But they certainly kept us riveted. You could hardly call politics a switch-off these days.

The most preposterous was John Prescott’s affair. “How could he?” asked the more uxorious of commentators. “How could she?” was my reaction, along with most of my women friends. “I find it difficult to think about it in any terms other than ‘yuck’,” admitted a female colleague of the Deputy Prime Minister. And to think that he was so brazen about it in front of his staff — like a 13-year-old boy who can’t resist showing off his new conquest. Yuck, indeed.

There is no immediate question of Mr Prescott resigning, though many of us wonder why he was ever deemed competent enough to hold the job in the first place. But if more revelations come out, or if it turns out that he acted with impropriety, then he may be forced to leave soon. What is certain is that people think even less of him than they did before and that his worth as a powerbroker between Mr Blair and Gordon Brown has been seriously damaged.

The most overblown of the storylines was Patricia Hewitt’s mauling by the Royal College of Nursing. She has the solid support of the Prime Minister. At last week’s Cabinet Ms Hewitt gave a presentation on the NHS reforms and the improvements they are intended to deliver. Nobody around the table demurred. There were no disagreements on health reforms as there were on education. The only discussion was about to communicate it better to the public.

Ms Hewitt is no great communicator. She sounds like the teacher of the bottom maths set, patiently spelling out in words of one syllable to the dimmest and most recalcitrant pupil how to do long multiplication. It can be infuriating to listen to, and it is no wonder that people feel patronised.

But the substance of what she is doing makes sense. And the deficits that are now emerging in a tiny minority of hospitals are a predictable consequence of making managers more responsible for their budgets and giving patients more choice.

Mr Blair sees this as merely a transitional problem, and is pleased that it is taking place early in the Parliament so that the benefits of the reforms can be felt by patients well before the next election. He was encouraged by the recent British Social Attitudes survey showing that 77 per cent of the public now support tuition fees. Who would have predicted that when those bruising battles were being fought in the last Parliament?

The man who fought those battles as Education Secretary is near to being floored on another front. Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, has never been famed for his diplomatic skills. It was Alan Johnson, then his Higher Education Minister, who joked during the arguments over top-up fees that the two men embarked on a charm offensive. “I did the charm; Charles was offensive.”

Mr Clarke can’t resist joining an argument, and often can’t resist starting one either. He may now be regretting that he has not beguiled his parliamentary colleagues with more charm over the years. But he is still more popular in the Commons than either Ms Hewitt or Mr Prescott, and though MPs are angry that the foreign prisoner scandal is imperilling Labour’s chances at next week’s local elections, they are not yet calling for him to go.

Nor is the Prime Minister — yet. But he is clearly annoyed that the Home Secretary did not initially spell out to him, or to the country, the scale of the problem. His advice to ministers is always to be absolutely sure of their facts before they make anything public. Mr Clarke was not listening.

Nor, it seems, did he bother to follow the Prime Minister’s example in chasing up officials. When Mr Blair focuses on a politically embarrassing issue, such as asylum applications or street crime, he demands weekly progress reports and regular meetings to ensure that the change he is demanding is actually happening. Had Mr Clarke done this when he was first warned about foreign ex-prisoners failing to be deported, he would not now be in the mess that he is in. Throwing £3 million at a problem and then forgetting about it solves little.

So can Mr Clarke survive? If a foreign murderer or rapist or paedophile turns out to have reoffended after release, it will be hard for Mr Clarke to stay. Failing that, his future depends on how indispensable Mr Blair believes him to be.

The Prime Minister understands what a difficult department the Home Office is to run. But, at the very least, he is determined that Mr Clarke should both conduct a rapid investigation of all the cases in which a foreign prisoner has been released into the community and produce convincing operational changes that will address the systemic failures that allowed this scandal to erupt in the first place.

The Prime Minister has a good, but not close, relationship with the Home Secretary. Although Mr Clarke is more of a Kinnockite than a Blairite, he is publicly loyal to Mr Blair and has never indulged in any Brown-nosing, unlike many of his colleagues.

But Mr Blair is planning a reshuffle soon after the local elections. Ms Hewitt will remain in the Cabinet, though not necessarily in her current job. Messrs Prescott and Clarke are more vulnerable, at the mercy of what is uncovered by the press between now and then. Switch on again next week for more political cliffhangers.

maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk

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