In ascending order of autocracy, Tony Blair has been variously compared to Margaret Thatcher, Napoleon Bonaparte, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, even and most absurdly to Adolf Hitler. The latest voice to suggest that this prime minister is much too prime speaks in a superior accent. It belongs to Lord Butler of Brockwell, Cabinet secretary in the first eight months of the Blair government and, before that, to John Major and to Mrs. Thatcher. Lord Butler is too sophisticated to crudely accuse Mr. Blair of running his government on the Fuhrer principle. But he adds his mandarin imprint to a view that has become commonplace. Under this prime minister, the watchdogs of the constitution have been neutered by ‘too much central control’ from No. 10. A spayed Parliament lets through a ‘huge number of extremely bad Bills’. A muzzled Cabinet ‘doesn’t make decisions’. The ‘exclusion of advice’ from the civil service when it produces ‘boringly inconvenient answers’ is to blame for ‘mistakes’. While decrying the prime minister’s hunger for headlines, Lord Butler has grabbed quite a few himself by saying that the executive is ‘much too free’ to ‘do whatever it likes.’
Some apologists for Mr. Blair’s style of governing have reacted with angry amazement that they should have to listen to this lofty admonition from a mandarin who spent so many years at the right hand of Margaret Thatcher: She Who Must Be Obeyed. If ever there was an example of bad legislation rammed through a compliant Parliament without detailed Cabinet debate it was surely her disastrous poll tax. More tellingly, one close ally of the prime minister reacts to the Butler critique that Mr. Blair is all—powerful by groaning: ‘If only it were true.’
A less orthodox, but to my mind more accurate, account of the Blair government would be how it has struggled to impose its authority, especially on the mandarinate exemplified by Lord Butler himself.
It is absolutely correct that Tony Blair came to power wanting to run a very tightly centralized regime. It was his own Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, who used the word Napoleonic to describe how No. 10 planned to stamp its writ across Whitehall. Planning to do something is not, however, the same as doing it.
The ambition to create an Office of the Prime Minister at No. 10, a British version of the West Wing, has never been properly realized. Gordon Brown, naturally resistant to the creation of a rival to his government over at the Treasury, did all he could to starve Mr. Blair’s idea of funds and constrict the flow of information to Downing Street. Money and knowledge are power. The Treasury had it; No. 10 didn’t. And Mr. Brown wanted it kept that way.
Whitehall itself also resisted the prime minister. Lord Butler’s successor as Cabinet secretary was Sir Richard Wilson. He once gave a new recruit to the staff at No. 10 a tutorial in how she should respect the civil service, because they controlled the levers of the machine. To her considerable astonishment, Sir Richard mused: ‘You need to understand that the prime minister isn’t really in charge of anything.’
Mr. Blair had an ambition to improve the caliber of the higher echelons of the mandarinate by recruiting talents from outside Whitehall who would focus on delivery in a way the civil service traditionally hadn’t. There was a proposal to split the Cabinet secretary’s role to create a new Whitehall ‘chief executive’ who would ensure that change was driven through the system. This plan was blocked.
There has been some pressure on the senior civil service to put more emphasis on results, but it has happened much more slowly than Mr. Blair hoped. All three of his Cabinet secretaries have been promoted from the traditional civil service hierarchy, as has virtually every permanent secretary.
When it came to taking control of the civil service, New LaboUr rather kippered itself. The one person who did get a grip on his part of Whitehall was Alastair Campbell. He ruthlessly purged civil servants whom he regarded as useless communicators and tried to inculcate the rest of the media arm of government with the propaganda doctrines of New Labour. For Mr. Campbell’s success, the rest of the government paid a price. The media got up the charge that New Labour was trying to ‘politicise’ Whitehall which made ministers more wary of challenging the power structures of the civil service.
“I can’t take them on,” one member of the Cabinet once complained to me, and he is among the most robust of ministers. “If I take them on, I know they will leak against me.”
Mr. Blair’s preference for governing from the sofa in his office, and the hazards of that approach, were detailed in Lord Butler’s inquiry into the intelligence failures in the run—up to the Iraq war. One of the explanations for why this prime minister adopted this style is that the civil service didn’t win his trust.
Another reason was his own lack of experience at running a bureaucracy. In his first term, Mr. Blair was learning on the job. He now tells friends that he regrets he didn’t start driving reform of the public services much earlier in the life of the government. It was only in his second term that he began to work out which pedals to push and buttons to press to get performance from the machine. Other ministers make a similar point. Even the best of them take eighteen months to impose themselves on their departments and get their civil servants with the program. The mediocre never do and become the servants of their bureaucracies.
When Lord Butler complains that Mr. Blair has been obsessed with securing “what will get the best headlines tomorrow” that criticism is not wrong, even if it is rather familiar. But it sits a little oddly with his complaint that this government is “so free of any inhibition that is imposed by Parliament or the public”. As for the Cabinet, ministers who sit around the table these days say that Lord Butler’s critique is correct about the early years of this government when, for instance, Mr. Blair steamrollered over the objections of a big majority in Cabinet in order to press ahead with the ridiculous Dome. But ministers have been much more assertive of their views in this second term, and much readier to advertise their differences with each other, even if they have not all gone as far as David Blunkett by giving a detailed, on the record account of his colleagues’ flaws to a biographer.
Stephen Pollard’s book provides fresh evidence that the prime minister, far from being an untrammeled autocrat, has often been stymied and sometimes menaced by the bigger beasts of the Cabinet. They ganged up against the prime minister’s ambitions to realign politics by making an alliance with the Liberal Democrats as they have also strewn obstacles in the way of his hopes of taking Britain into the European single currency.
