Tony Blair’s successor should immediately establish a Department of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet to drive through reform of public services.

The central issue of modern politics is how to secure constantly improving performance across the public services without raising taxes. To help achieve this, the new department, based on the Australian example, should incorporate No 10 and the Cabinet Office.

Whenever this happens, there will be those who will condemn it as an unwarranted extension of prime ministerial power, but at the moment of appointment, any new Prime Minister has an extraordinary (if fleeting) honeymoon period which it would be a shame to waste.

The incoming Prime Minister should unapologetically justify it on the grounds of effectiveness and coherence. Clarity will replace fudge, blunt will become sharp. Moreover, he or she should argue that the intention is for the new department to have fewer people in total than No 10 and the Cabinet Office had in the past, so there would be an efficiency gain too.

As a signal of intent, an important new Cabinet committee, public service policy and expenditure, should be established and chaired by the Prime Minister, with a secretariat provided jointly by the new department and the Treasury. Below the Cabinet Secretary, there should be two permanent secretaries, one responsible for strategy and performance (both policy thinking and delivery) and the other for the underlying capability and capacity of the Civil Service (people and skills).

The new Prime Minister needs to apply the best modern personnel management techniques, including the training and development of high potential junior ministers and the creation of guiding coalitions of ministers, special advisers and top officials in every department. These changes are necessary because the job of Prime Minister has been stretched and become extremely demanding. Contrary to much of the commentary on prime ministerial power, it should be strengthened not weakened.

My proposals would not just strengthen the Prime Minister, but strengthen the Chancellor, the Cabinet and the top civil servants too. How come everyone gains and nobody loses? By enhancing the crucial relationships at both political and official level, these proposals would generate additional power, making it possible to enhance the quality, speed and impact with which reform is implemented.

All Prime Ministers face constraints, from their Cabinets, departments and the “official view”, but in Tony Blair’s case there has been the major personal one that, prior to entering Downing Street, he had never run a government department, or even been a junior minister. As a consequence, he had a huge amount to learn about how organisations, especially large bureaucracies, work.

He has always had a tendency – at one level a strength because it means he takes on intractable issues – to believe that in the end, through an act of his own personal will and the exercise of his own formidable powers of persuasion, he could achieve almost anything: pass a law, change a system, stop a revolt by backbenchers and bring a conflict to an end. More often than his critics would like to admit, the optimism to which this characteristic gives rise has proved justified. The Good Friday deal was secured, his higher education reforms came through. But sometimes it didn’t work, and Blair felt lonely and let down by his colleagues and the system as a whole.

A further constraint on Blair’s power that applies uniquely to him is the relationship with his Chancellor, Gordon Brown. The successes of the Government are a joint achievement and together Blair and Brown have so far achieved far more together than either could have achieved alone.

The major cost is the dilemmas and sometimes downright confusion it sometimes causes in the key departments on which Blair depends to deliver the transformation of the public services he craves. Secretaries of state have to decide whether they are predominantly in the Brown camp or the Blair camp or whether they will seek to be in both. The system of dual power at the top, and the way it was played out in practice, brought huge positive impact as well as periodic problems.

Challenged by the remorseless stretching of the job, scrutinised as never before by Parliament, the public and the media, and living with these additional self-imposed constraints, Blair carries a far heavier burden than any of his Cabinet colleagues. Yet, ironically, he is the only who does not have a department or a ministerial team to share his burden. In No 10 itself, while the people were extremely talented and devoted to the Prime Minister, they were certainly not organised in a structured team. A former colleague likened them to the Real Madrid squad with its galácticos:imagine, he said, if they played the whole squad at once.

Blair clears his boxes promptly, works consistently hard, rarely if ever panics, keeps on top of the immense demands of his job, and is a pleasure to work for, but no one, least of all Blair himself, would call him either an outstanding chairman or the tidiest-minded of men. If a given Prime Minister had prodigious talents, but not necessarily for tidy administration, then, at least in part, it is up to those around him to make effective arrangements. Successive Cabinet Secretaries and I could and should have been more effective. Blair’s successors, whoever they are and from whichever party they come, deserve better.

Sir Michael Barber created and ran the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit from 2001-05. In the first Labour term, he was head of the standards and effectiveness unit in the Education Department. Instruction to Deliver – Tony Blair, Public Services and Achieving Targets is published on May 29 by Politico’s at £19.99.

Parallels with a President that highlighted unspoken regrets

Back in Tony Blair’s office, I gave him a book to read in his summer holidays: Edmund Morris’s outstanding biography of Teddy Roosevelt as President, Theodore Rex. There were two reasons, I said. First, Roosevelt was my favourite President; second, I thought he was the politician in history who most resembled Blair – each propelled into leadership by an unexpected death, each dealing with glo-balisation at the turn of a new century, each persuasive and charismatic in public, each with young children while in office, each with a tendency towards activism in foreign policy, each committed to a pro-business, pro-competition policy in the economic sphere and each in favour of social policies that would reduce burdens on the hard-working poor.

“Wasn’t he a great hunter?” Blair asked, perhaps considering a new hobby. “And how many terms did he serve?” came the next question.

“Two. He decided not to run for a third term in 1908 and always regretted it,” I replied, thoughtlessly missing the obvious parallel.

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