When I interviewed Denis MacShane at Labour's spring conference in Manchester, he seemed keen to use the bombs in Madrid to claim some sort of new Euro unity. Twenty-four hours later, that line, no doubt fed to him by Peter Mandelson, was shattered as the Spanish government was humiliated in that country's parliamentary elections. Normally you would expect one socialist leader to welcome the election of another, but Downing Street was positively frosty over the success of Jose Luis RodrIguez Zapatero.
What the Foreign Office minister was equally eager to tell BBC listeners was that the Madrid bombs had nothing to do with the Spanish government's enthusiastic backing of George Bush and Tony Blair's war on Iraq. No wonder the new prime minister talks about Blair's lies to the British people. Blair is just lucky that the Tories didn't oppose the war, otherwise he, too, would surely be heading for defeat.
But defeat was not on anyone's mind in Manchester. MPs and ministers were back to singing from the same hymn sheet. Apparently, we were told, people's individual experiences of the health
service and schools are generally good, but
they think everyone else's is bad. Doesn't it occur to the Prime Minister that this is
because no one trusts a word he says now?
In Budget week, Blair had every reason to be thankful to his Chancellor. Once again, Gordon Brown hit all his growth forecasts. And what had every economic and political commentator said last year? "The Chancellor's forecasts are crazy." I didn't see a word of apology after Wednesday, though.
