All party leaders are control freaks. Some are more successful at controlling than others, but none of them is relaxed about the rise of dissenters within their own ranks.

This is as true of former Labour leaders, now being viewed with nostalgia in some quarters, as it has been of Tory ones. Margaret Thatcher's crowning epitaph, "Is he one of us?", conveyed perfectly her autocratic streak. If he was not "one of us", he (very few "shes" got a look in) could forget about advancement in her party and would be relentlessly excluded from all areas over which she wielded patronage. Neil Kinnock was ruthless in dealing with those he perceived to be internal enemies, including Ken Livingstone, who would have been dead and buried long ago under a Kinnock regime. Harold Wilson established a "broad church", but only because political circumstances demanded it of him. He spent much time and energy manoeuvring behind the scenes to get his own way and warned rebellious MPs that they were like dogs who might lose their licences (ie, official Labour endorsement). John Major's control freakery extended to withdrawing the whip from so many of his MPs that he nearly deprived his own government of its Commons majority. The question to be asked of Tony Blair is not whether he is different from his predecessors in his controlling instincts, but whether he should be.

I am deeply suspicious of those who affect horror at so-called control freakery. The same newspapers that now urge Blair to let a thousand rebels bloom would assault the party for its subsequent public divisions, while the Conservative leadership would die for the kind of control Blair has been able to exert. I am suspicious, too, of those in the Labour Party who have suddenly discovered a passion for new forms of internal democracy when they were quite relaxed with the old, utterly undemocratic internal procedures when they delivered the outcomes they wanted. Politicians tend to approve of voting systems where they or their allies are the main beneficiaries.

In some ways, Blair is not a big enough control freak. The Sun seems to have a veto, in the short term at least, on Britain's approach to the euro. Middle England car-lovers have a veto over transport policy. The Prime Minister cannot carry his cabinet on electoral reform and so a referendum is delayed while he decides what to do.

Meanwhile the unelected House of Lords is already starting to force this theoretically mighty government to dance to its discordant tunes. Whatever anyone may think of closed lists as a way of selecting candidates, there is no justification for the Lords to behave in this destructive fashion, a mere overture to the real drama to come over the hereditary peers.

As for controlling his party, sometimes Blair will get his way, sometimes he will not. He will probably get his way over preventing Ken Livingstone from standing for mayor of London, but Rhodri Morgan could well win in Wales. He has some defeats behind him: Peter Mandelson failed to beat Ken Livingstone in the 1997 NEC elections, and the Blairite slate did even worse this year. And sometimes the Downing Street press machine can control a story, but quite a lot of the time, with a huge and diverse media interest in politics, it cannot. The longer the government serves the harder it will become to control both party and media.

Like all politicians, the Blairites are the product of their early apprenticeship. Never forget that Blair, and indeed Gordon Brown, were elected to the House of Commons in 1983, when public division and lack of central control threatened to destroy the Labour Party. Peter Mandelson gave up a job in the media to take up his communications post shortly afterwards. Alastair Campbell started to write his propagandist columns in the Daily Mirror at around the same time. Philip Gould was having sleepless nights as his focus groups despaired of the warring alternative to Thatcherism (if I read his book correctly, Gould hardly slept at all between 1985 and 1997). None of these people will ever be other than tough disciplinarians. It is in their blood after their early experiences in the 1980s.

Sometimes they will go over the top, incapable of realising that politics has moved on.

Jim Callaghan told me in an interview last year that his experience of the recession in the 1930s shaped his outlook to such an extent that he was immune, as prime minister in the 1970s, to the new approaches and ideas that were starting to emerge in that later era of economic decline. Similarly the pluralist agenda that the Blairites are navigating now will sometimes demand of them a tolerance of diverse views which they have been conditioned to reject.

In some ways Blair resembles David Owen, a great admirer of this government, who used to berate the politics of "fudge and mudge" when his own actions made compromise and an ability to co-operate with other parties an essential precondition to progress.

So the party machine, still seeking a similar orgasmic experience to the 1997 election campaign, went over the top when it sent a memo to NEC members demanding that they speak to the media only if they have consulted the party press office. All the talk of loyalty tests and MPs facing deselection is also excessive, as if the leadership is still fighting the battles of the 1980s which, on a psychological level, it probably is.

The rest is overblown. The issue has become the great red herring of our times, diverting us from what the government is actually doing. Talking of which, ministers need to offer some very substantial policy meat for us to chew over in next week's Queen's Speech to replace the vacuum filled by this silly obsession about control.

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