TONY BLAIR and Gordon Brown could not save a single Rover job on their visit to Birmingham, their second emergency dash to Birmingham in a week. They knew that. That was not the point. Their aim was to show they cared, with cash. But both the amount and use of the cash was very different from what governments of both parties would have done up to the late 1980s.

It is tempting to see all the drama and activity — the cancellation of campaign events by Mr Blair and the delay of a flight to Washington by Mr Brown — as partly, if not largely, dictated by electoral pressures. Plenty of other factories have been closed down without personal visits by the Prime Minister and Chancellor, or such sizeable help to redundant workers.

Of course, the timing, in the middle of the election campaign, and location, in the West Midlands, matter. It is a first rule of elections that politicians cannot appear to be wrong footed by sudden developments. They have to be seen to be acting: if not in charge of events that they cannot control, then at least to demonstrate that they are responding promptly. So we had a mixture of “I share your pain” from Mr Blair and “on the side of hard-working families” from Mr Brown, backed up by £150 million in immediate support for the redundant workers.

While all the presentation has been affected by the election timing, the substance has not. If a similar situation had arisen in the 1960s and 1970s, with the closure of a major car factory, then either a Labour or Conservative Government would have intervened with subsidies to keep production going. That was, after all, done by the Wilson, Heath, Callaghan and Thatcher Governments in various sectors. The results were almost universally bad in the medium to long term, as most of the jobs were eventually lost and taxpayers paid out billions of pounds.

But governments no longer pretend they can guarantee specific jobs, even though they like to claim the credit for overall falls in unemployment or rises in employment. Admittedly, there was the offer of £6.5 million a week ago to pay the workers while negotiations continued. That was in the hope of postponing a decision on closure if possible. But no one pretended that it could be a lasting solution, especially when other motor car factories in Britain are thriving.

So when the crunch came, the Government accepted that closure could not be avoided and concentrated on helping with cushioning the immediate pain ( for instance, on Rover cars bought with loans by workers), while assisting with retraining schemes and helping to create jobs in a new industrial park. Mr Blair also pointed out that recent legislation will protect workers’ pensions.

There will undoubtedly be shock effect from the loss of so many jobs. But the electoral impact of the company’s collapse may be limited. This is partly because of a general acceptance that there was not an easy alternative on offer. Moreover, the Oppostion parties have merely said that perhaps the situation might have been better if the Government had got involved earlier. But they were not calling for a bail-out by the Government.

The closure of Rover is unlikely to change the course of the election, even though it has diverted Labour’s campaign and has reminded the public of how far British industry has changed.

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