IF YOU RUN a government, or an apple cart, or a small company manufacturing ladies’ knickers, then when the time comes to quit and hand over the business to your successor, there will really be only one sensible way to arrange this.
Accept what both of you must: that the business will soon be wholly in his hands, that your power to map its direction is fading, and that — though you remain in charge until the moment the handover takes place — the interests of the enterprise are best served by including the new boss in any plans that reach into the years after you have quit.
For both of you know that your successor has an effective veto over anything you start. He does not have to continue with it; he can reverse it once you have gone. This is not an indication of mischief in your successor: it’s just a fact about succession. Though the formal transfer of power may occur by the stroke of a pen, the real transfer begins long before the handover ceremony: a shading, not a line.
A meeting of minds between the individuals suits the interests of both the old and the new regime: the latter can hope for a good start, with work in hand and plans pointing in the desired direction; the former can avoid wasting time with doomed projects, and make a dignified exit. The rupture of processes and the overturning of plans is bad for business. No less than the manufacture of knickers, the business of government is a production line. Any human endeavour where plans sprawl across the reigns of more than one boss should be seen as a process rather than a series.
Of course democracy can get in the way, and sometimes should. Sometimes prime ministers are forcibly ejected, either by their own side or by another political party. Often the identity of the new leader is unknown — an open question — until the old one steps down. Sometimes discontinuity is precisely what the voters demand. But in Tony Blair’s case, and if we are to believe what he says, no revolution is required or desired when he goes. Nor should there be any mystery about who will replace him.
This is more unusual than perhaps we realise. Macmillan could not have helped Home, Wilson Callaghan or Thatcher Major, in this way. Extended notice, and the scope it gives for an orderly and sensible change, is rare. But Mr Blair has that opportunity.
Yet we pick up our newspapers or switch on our televisions to be assured that though: a) the present Prime Minister has indeed decided who should succeed him; he will nevertheless not b) give his successor a date for this; or c) agree with him the agenda for the years leading up to it. He is in the meantime carrying on with his own programme for government regardless of whether his successor does or does not like it, aware that his successor can and may reverse it, and careless of whether he does.
In another age and another country such an attitude was characterised as après moi le déluge. But in this case le déluge is Mr Blair’s chosen successor, Gordon Brown. Though myself unpersuaded that Mr Brown will prove the miracle worker his party expects, I want to enter a word in his defence — and in a week in which the political mortality of the present Prime Minister has been brought home to us in a sensational way.
For what is Downing Street inviting us to conclude? The picture is bizarre. It is that Mr Blair is “conscious” that he has only “limited time” to “secure his legacy” and is determinedly going about that task as is his absolute right and duty, while an upstart Chancellor of the Exchequer is storming madly about the shop, refusing to co-operate, and generally behaving in a thoroughly unreasonable way.
Which, then, of these two men is really the mad one? It is true that Mr Brown seems to be rather odd. It is true that Mr Blair conveys a beguiling appearance of normality.
It is true that Alastair Campbell’s alleged description of Mr Brown as “psychologically flawed” has lodged itself in the collective psyche of the Westminster commentariat. But in this instance, isn’t it the Prime Minister and not his Chancellor whose behaviour is delusional?
What sort of self-deception, or petulance, or caprice, can inhabit Mr Blair if he supposes it reasonable to carry on at Downing Street without asking his successor to sit down with him now and agree a programme for government into which both men can throw themselves with enthusiasm: Blair leading this side, and Brown the other, of an agreed point of handover?
What arrogant fancy grips a prime minister who supposes that in the last year or two of a premiership, he can suddenly weigh anchor, leave the shelter of the harbour walls and strike out for distant continents in a vessel whose helm he will have to yield to another skipper long before land is sighted?
Let’s be clear: unless Gordon Brown has agreed the ship’s course, HMS New Labour is going nowhere.
In which case I have a suggestion for the Editor of The Times. For the next few years we can save all those pages of parliamentary reports and commentary on proposed new Blairite reforms and initiatives. All will be going nowhere. Maybe we could extend the Letters section instead, as readers’ opinions about what the Government should do would be at least as interesting as the Prime Minister’s.
Why even bother to read the White Paper on the restructuring of secondary education? These measures aren’t going to happen. Why bother with Work and Pensions and the reform of sickness benefits? Mr Blair’s welfare changes are headed for the long grass. The Respect Agenda, baby ASBOs, and all that? Forget it. The Big Conversation? Forgotten it already.
In the sunset years of Tony Blair’s premiership the House of Commons will increasingly resemble one of those youth parliaments they organise in the Midlands: an aerated assemblage of supporters and opponents of legislative castles in the clouds. Most of the political output of the BBC Radio 4 could be put over on to long-wave.
The prospect is absurd. So why on earth is the Prime Minister contemplating it? I have often maintained that life is too short to deconstruct the mental processes of T. Blair, but we should have one last try. So I will attempt a mental leap which is, for this columnist, tremendously difficult. I will start from the assumption that Mr Blair is not off his rocker.
If so, if there is a rational explanation for his behaviour, and if we agree (as we must) that the legacy he gives the appearance of trying to construct is doomed, then what is afoot? Two possible answers can be constructed, both subversive.
One is that Mr Blair does not really intend Gordon Brown to succeed him. A few commentators, perhaps including Mr Brown, have long suspected this. In this case Mr Blair’s strategy would be to edge his Chancellor into so alienated a posture that talk of a “natural” succession would die, without Mr Blair himself having seemed to betray a promise. Mr Brown would look like the betrayer, and other potential heirs would come forward.
But there is an even darker possibility: that Mr Blair does want Mr Brown to succeed, but in only one sense of the word: to succeed him, then fail. In this case the present Prime Minister would be unafraid of coming a cropper, and careless whether his reform agenda ever does get onto the statute book. It would not have to be tested.
Mr Blair would be saying to history: “You’ll miss me when I’m gone.” History would say to Tony Blair: “If only we had appreciated you while we could.” Thus, not in the success but in the wreckage of what he tried to do, would Tony Blair’s legacy be secure. Martyrdom: what a sick idea.
