The Charles Clarke interview

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THE Labour Government is lacking leadership and direction because Tony Blair has lost his sense of purpose, Charles Clarke tells The Times today.

The former Home Secretary speaks of the Government becoming becalmed, says that Mr Blair’s decision to sack him has stalled reform at the Home Office and launches an astonishingly attack on John Reid, his successor.

In his first national newspaper interview since Mr Blair dismissed him over the foreign prisoners fiasco, Mr Clarke gives one of the most damaging assessments of the Prime Minister ever made publicly by one of his allies.

He makes plain that he hopes Mr Blair can stay on but he delivers a wounding verdict on the state of the Government and Mr Blair, suggesting that he has lost his drive to reform.

Mr Blair needed to recover “the reforming leadership and style which was his great strength over the first seven or eight years of his premiership”. He needed to “refocus”.

He says: “I do think there is a sense of Tony having lost his sense of purpose and direction, so my advice to him is to recover that sense of purpose and direction.”

But he also warns Mr Reid against jumping on the bandwagons of tabloid campaigns and says that his onslaught on the immigration directorate as being “not fit for purpose” was “fundamentally wrong”. It had played into the hands of Labour’s enemies, who claimed wrongly that it showed nothing had been achieved on law and order in nine years.

He says that he is speaking out to defend his reputation and is not prepared to take responsibility for the actions of Mr Reid. Mr Clarke is understood to believe that the re- shuffle set back the Government’s reform programme and was “crazy”. In the interview, Mr Clarke says that 2008 has always been the “logical” year for Mr Blair to step down, almost certainly in favour of Gordon Brown, but accepts that it was possible he would go earlier.

Even under Mr Brown the party would need to regain its sense of leadership and direction. “What we are lacking at the moment is a sense of leadership and direction. That can either be solved by Tony himself recovering in the way he has the capacity to do — that would still be the best solution — or by Gordon being elected with that sense of leadership and direction himself and offering that to the party and the country.” He adds: “My preferred option in all of this is for Tony to keep going and re- cover that sense of leadership.”

Mr Clarke praises the way that Mr Brown is preparing for the transition and even disclosed that he had advised him to make a series of speeches outside his Treasury brief to enable people to understand his aims and ambitions for Britain. Mr Clarke’s intervention will reinforce growing doubts among Labour MPs, who are questioning why Mr Blair should soldier on for much longer.

His words will be used by supporters of Mr Brown to argue that the Chancellor should take over soon, giving him time to reinvigorate the Labour Party, and give it the sense of purpose that Mr Clarke says is now missing.

Mr Clarke says that he had been given to understand by Mr Blair that he would have three or four years to sort out the Home Office’s problems and restructure the department so that it could deal with the inevitable crises that blew up.

The foreign prisoner fiasco was one such area, but to his “frustration” Mr Blair had removed him before he could complete it. “I think he should have stayed with me in this post and I certainly think he should have retained his commitment to the reform process,” he says.

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