Ross McKibbin

That a week is a long time in politics is one of those wise sayings which usually turns out to be untrue. Not now. All those articles written only a couple of weeks ago and giving entirely good reasons why Gordon Brown was on top and David Cameron on the ropes now look faintly embarrassing. But at the beginning of October Brown was on top and no one can be faulted for failing to see his...

Gordon Brown has become prime minister with less seeming to be known about him, and what he thinks and believes, than almost any other holder of the office. As chancellor, he showed an exceptionally narrow concern with his brief and usually disclosed an opinion on anything outside it only if absolutely forced to. As a result many unanswered questions circulate around him. What is he for? Why was he elected? Is he expected to be different from his predecessor? More ‘left-wing’? More Old Labour? The fact that he kept his cards so close to his chest encouraged many to hope that once his own man, he would somehow liberate himself from the more dogmatic excesses of New Labour. (I had hoped – forlornly – that he might try to save comprehensive schools.) Even as prime minister, he keeps his cards chestwards. His reaction to the prison officers’ and the London Underground strikes was characteristic. He saw in them only inflationary wage claims, and didn’t appear to give a thought to the wider context – to the horror of working in British prisons, on the one hand, and to the failure of the private management of London Underground maintenance, on the other – for which in both cases he shares (or bears) the responsibility. Yet there is already enough on record – and more than enough from his chancellorship – to suggest what kind of politician he is.

Tony Blair’s political career (assuming his interminable delay actually ends in departure) is difficult to assess. He has been, electorally, the most successful British prime minister of the last hundred years: not even Baldwin or Thatcher quite equals him. Yet the record of his governments has been one of opportunities half-caught or missed entirely, of impulses that were sometimes admirable but rarely acted on, of reasonable but not unusual administrative competence, of some genuinely wrong-headed or shameful policies and, of course, a disastrous adventure abroad. Its overall record is incoherent, and becoming more so.

There is general agreement that the government is in a mess: sleazy, corrupt, humiliated and, probably even more than the Conservative government in its last days, despised by many of its natural supporters. It is difficult to remember a cabinet held in such contempt by so many. Yet the reasons for the contempt and the extent to which it is shared by the electorate as a whole are less easy to judge. By the limited criteria we generally use to assess these things, the Blair government is reasonably competent. The economy potters along fairly steadily; there have (not yet) been any of those financial ‘crises’ that have come close to wrecking previous administrations. And unpopular though the government is, it is nowhere near as unpopular as John Major’s was.

If the prime minister hoped to deflect attention from the local election results by a well-timed reshuffle he has certainly succeeded. Much was thought to hang on the election results and they were as bad as Labour expected. Despite the panicky reshuffle, however, it isn’t clear how much we can read into them. Local elections in the last days of John Major’s government did, it’s true, accurately predict the outcome of the 1997 general election, but that is very unusual. In any case, comparisons between Major’s last days and the position of the present government don’t really hold up. Labour’s standing in the polls, though not high, is not much lower than its actual vote in the general election. And although Labour did badly in the 2004 local elections and in the last European elections, it nonetheless won the general election. With such low turnouts what matters is who bothers to vote; and it is the discontented who are most likely to do so. Nor, despite what some have said, is there the sense of terminal decay (though the reshuffle certainly has a whiff of it) that marked Major’s government. However unfair to John Major it might be, as an electoral burden Iraq isn’t Black Wednesday.