Smash hit

Yet Mr Blair seems haggard and oppressed. He gazed unsmiling from the Blair family Christmas card as if recovering from a terrible accident. Here is a man who has fashioned a style of government of his own, focusing attention and power on his own office to a degree unprecented in peacetime. Yet he seems ill at ease.

I am constantly reminded that Mr Blair came to Downing Street with no executive experience. He had not run a business or a public institution or a government department. He knew nothing of delegation. He came from the law, where work is based on private networks of consultants, clients and fees. On coming to office he brought with him two mentors, Mr Mandelson and Mr Campbell, whose background was exclusively in the media.

This triumvirate brought to the heart of British government the responses not of public administration but of the law and journalism. Those responses were short term, bullying and risk averse. There is no doubt who was dominant. Mr Campbell was like the indispensable but sinister Gollum, leading “Frodo” Blair through his daily mishaps across Tolkien’s Land of Mordor. Now both Mr Mandelson and Mr Campbell are gone and the fellowship of the ring has dissolved. Mr Blair seems strangely lost. Lawyers are his only Shire.

The Prime Minister indicated on Sunday that he would answer personally for the Hutton report. Why? Only if Hutton calls, in effect, for his head might such a response seem required. What amounts to a coroner’s inquest into the death of an official is for the judiciary and perhaps the Defence Ministry. Yet the Prime Minister cannot resist the limelight. Whatever is the business of government must be the business of Mr Blair. That way lies madness.

I make a humble suggestion. Mr Blair should seek out a group of trusted political associates and put them in charge of designated areas of government. They should be competent, able to formulate policy, ready to accept credit and take blame. Mr Blair should meet them regularly but not undermine their status or grab their headlines. He should regard them as plenipotentiary. He might call them “Cabinet Ministers”.

Mr Blair should then form a permanent cadre of officials, scrupulously non-political but showing complete loyalty to ministers. Their integrity and independent advice would not be undermined by here today, gone tomorrow political advisers. They would not drop in and out of Whitehall, with a leak or a memoir as they go. Their reward would be not incentive bonuses but a secure career and a pension. This might be called the “Civil Service”.

In Downing Street itself Mr Blair should chuck out his orgy of sycophants. He should ask the Cabinet Secretary to form a team of Civil Service high-flyers, whose job would be to co-ordinate decisions and deflect the media and all trouble to relevant ministries. No policy pronouncements would emanate from Downing Street. Mr Blair would be left free to think, breathe and lead. This could even be named “Cabinet Government”.

I cannot promise such a system would work. But it survived in Britain for a century before Mr Blair came to power. And it gave us Prime Ministers who did not whinge about “a thousand people kicking my backside morning, noon and night”.

simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk

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