ONCE UPON a time there was a grid. This grid was a most meticulous thing. The grid ran the Government. The grid
was the Government; a day-by-day plan of announcements, interviews, visits, “message” — the heart, brain and soul of a new Labour day. In an Orwellian way, if something wasn’t on the grid, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t exist. It was a non-event. The only minister able to buck the grid, to operate outside it, was Gordon Brown.
O grid, hast though forsaken TB? There was little evidence of any planning in the shambolic way in which the referendum U-turn was announced by No 10 last week. I use the term “announced” vaguely. Pro-European ministers such as Charles Clarke and Patricia Hewitt, who were not opposed to a referendum per se, are right to be infuriated by the way a potential advantage morphed into a disaster.
There was no plot by Cabinet ministers to bounce Mr Blair into the U-turn (although Mr Brown is not thought to have entirely clean hands). Nor was it some form of Murdoch press conspiracy, as has been widely alleged. Nobody with authority tipped off — or at least nobody meant to tip off — either The Sun or The Times with a ready-made scoop; the stories in both papers were the result of winks, judgment and ferreting.
Far from being the victim of a Cabinet plot, Mr Blair was the victim of bad management. Organisational chaos, in a project as managerial as new Labour, has the potential to be catastrophic. Cabinet plots the Prime Minister can handle; his own Chancellor has spent much of his premiership plotting against him, for goodness sake. The problems have been controlled through precise, some would say excessive, management.
Now that management seems to have collapsed. No matter how the referendum story was drifting out, it was clear as soon as it appeared on the front page of The Times that this was a question Mr Blair was going to be forced to answer. The succession of non-committal interviews, half denials, half admissions and finally the forced statement to Parliament which followed were a disaster. Mr Blair’s advisers in No 10 are distraught at the damage done to his credibility. A reverse which could have been portrayed (with some difficulty, granted) as a principled decision instead looked like a muddled, hastily cobbled together half-solution to a short-term strategic problem.
Nor was this the only chaotic announcement in the past week. The decision on ID cards has drifted out in similar disarrangement, with tales of Cabinet ministers at odds with one another; confused briefings as to the purpose of ID cards (to fight terror, or to fight benefit fraud); mixed messages about whether a system would be compulsory, etc.
It would never have happened had Alastair Campbell still been running the show. Say what you like about him, he kept an iron grip on the management of No 10. He would have seen the danger from the news stories on the referendum and would have forced Mr Blair to sit down, to take a decision (which it is not clear that the Prime Minister ever did; events simply forced him to confirm it), and to work out a strategy for how to release the news, quickly. But with Mr Campbell absent, and the departure by now of pretty much all the close circle that propelled him into power, the management of Mr Blair has collapsed.
Mr Campbell, who is still in regular contact with the Prime Minister, knew nothing of the decision. Peter Mandelson, unofficially back in No 10, knew nothing of it. The director of communications David Hill and the political secretary Pat McFadden appear to have known little more than that a change of mind was in the offing. There was no polling, no focus groups, no strategy in place. When I asked one of Mr Blair’s core team yesterday when he first knew of the U-turn he replied with impressive curvature: “It depends what you mean by ‘when’.” The sole person who appears to have been in the loop was Sally Morgan, the closest thing the Prime Minister has to a righthand man now, and she is being blamed for the mess.
So what, you think. Who are all these people and who cares? Good questions. To listen to some of Mr Blair’s advisers (and their media conduits), you would think that the Blair project was tottering to its grave. The Prime Minister’s shield has been dismantled, true. He has no one of the stature of Mr Campbell to protect him.
I am not sure that this isn’t a good thing. The over-management of No 10 — the playing safe, the focus groups, the government by numbers — stifled any creativity, risk or innovation. That Cabinet ministers are taking decisions, however haphazardly, rather than a neat cabal of advisers in No 10, can only be to the good. The message that will have filtered through to the world beyond Westminster from the events of the past week are that the Government is to hold a referendum on the EU constitution, and that it will introduce ID cards, both popular decisions. Policy makers in No 10 complain that Cabinet tensions keep blocking brave ideas. Yet here are two bold moves which are Cabinet inspired and implemented. They didn’t need to come from some whacky student of social demographics in the No 10 “blue skies” unit.
The grid is still there, I’m told. It has developed. It is now “an enhanced set-up”. It has been “streamlined”. There are “more people” involved. So who is in charge of it. I asked. A pause. “There are different people in charge of different things.” The messages are muddled. The lines have been bent. The grid has been griddled. Good.
