To leave office gracefully is a hard trick to pull off, especially because, as Enoch Powell noted, the departure almost certainly signals failure. Charles Clarke’s tenure at the Home Office is unlikely to go down as one of that department’s finest hours, and yet he was neither incompetent nor unintelligent. To find after 17 difficult months in a notoriously crisis-hit job that his successor is rubbishing his department and, by implication, him has no doubt been infuriating, as was the dismissal itself. He may have kept a lid on his furies for the past seven weeks, but his interview with The Times today provides a fascinating insight into the human rivalries and political strains at the top of government.

Mr Clarke’s relationship with his “friend” John Reid would make an interesting psychological study. His views — that his successor has made successive errors of judgment that have rebounded on the Government in general and Tony Blair in particular — prompt the thought as to what he would have said about a political enemy. Mr Reid has indeed been a little too swift to pump himself up as a man of action. He has already admitted that rushing to television studios is not necessarily the best way to behave as Home Secretary. He has also found it wise to tone down his initially bellicose approach to Home Office civil servants. In this respect, Mr Clarke’s criticism scores points.

His assertion that the Prime Minister has “lost his sense of purpose and direction” is more serious. This is not a call to arms akin to Sir Geoffrey Howe’s criticism of Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, Mr Clarke wants Mr Blair to go on, if not on and on. Nor does it carry the malice of Norman Lamont’s gibe that his “friend” John Major was “in office but not in power”. Mr Clarke simply wants his “friend” Mr Blair to rediscover his touch. But he does the Prime Minister no favours by suggesting that Mr Blair is currently aimless. Such a notion feeds the agenda of those who want Mr Blair on the international lecture circuit yesterday. It is instructive of the anxieties that swirl around government when change is in the air, though its timing and political meaning remain unclear.

Mr Clarke is in several senses a substantial Labour figure who, in a career encompassing Neil Kinnock’s inner sanctum and the Blair Cabinet, has experienced first-hand many of its highs and lows, and he therefore deserves to be listened to. But his criticisms also deserve context, which is often not best provided by a wronged man. While it may have been person- ally insensitive for Mr Reid to describe the Home Office vacated by Mr Clarke as “not fit for purpose”, nothing that has emerged in the past few months suggests that such a description is grossly inaccurate. Mr Clarke was a little too timid in trying to ring management changes at the top. If he had his time again, he would surely be more aggressive in challenging the department’s evident organisational weaknesses.

His observations about Mr Blair are inevitably coloured by his belief that he was removed without having the chance to see through the three or four-year reform programme that he believed was necessary. Had Mr Clarke read Mr Blair’s criminal justice speech last Friday, he would have seen the words of a leader full of apparent purpose but lacking in process. Mr Blair is not “becalmed”, but he should calm down.