On Thursday 4 May, I received a sensational piece of information. This was a day after the New Statesman had gone to press. We knew the story would not hold for a week, so I put it out on my new NS weblog instead. I reported that the Home Office had failed to deport a violent foreign criminal who went on to become a terrorist suspect. The post went up at 4.30pm and by 6pm the story was leading the BBC news. That evening Downing Street demanded an explanation from Charles Clarke’s office, but the game was up. The addition of an alleged terrorist to the ranks of foreign prisoners released into the community was too much for the Prime Minister. By morning his home secretary was gone, the most high-profile victim of the cabinet reshuffle.
After hearing that Clarke had been sacked, a former colleague sent me an e-mail dripping with irony: “Well done . . . it looks as though you did for the most liberal home secretary since Douglas Hurd.” I have since heard a similar line from Home Office insiders bracing themselves for the shamelessly illiberal John Reid. Downing Street, meanwhile, is in denial. At the weekend, officials were briefing journalists that the NS story had been responsible for the surge in BNP support in Barking. “Why couldn’t they wait until the polls closed?” an aide to Tony Blair complained. The reaction illustrates a delusion at the heart of government.
The events of recent days have demonstrated, again, Blair’s refusal to face up to a reality that seems obvious to all but his closest allies: his government’s predicament is no one’s fault but his own. In Clarke’s case it was an absurd new policy, driven by Blair, that made the home secretary’s position untenable. His fate was sealed when the PM announced that all foreign criminals with a sentence for a serious offence would face mandatory deportation. As with all knee-jerk legislation, it is worth asking why this had become necessary nine years into the present government. It soon became clear that the proposals are unworkable and probably illegal – it will still be impossible to send people back if they face likely death or torture. For Clarke, this was political cyanide. Blair had cut off any reasonable Home Office excuse for having allowed foreign ex-offenders to remain in the UK after they had served their time.
The catastrophic local elections, the misfortunes of Clarke and John Prescott and the cack-handed reshuffle led to a resumption of the warfare over the succession. Among the changes, the promotion of the Blairite “mighty mouse” Hazel Blears to party chair, ahead of the Chancellor’s favoured candidate, Douglas Alexander, particularly infuriated the Brownites. Their anger increased over the weekend, particularly after attempts by the new Home Secretary, John Reid, to represent Brown’s supporters as old Labour wreckers. The strategy now is to keep the subject of the handover out in the open, at all costs. “Blair has no option,” says a Brown ally. “We have to talk about it.”
Yet the succession, entertaining though it might be, is not the real issue. Blair will survive in the short term because there is no appetite for a coup. That is not to underestimate the level of pessimism in Labour ranks. For many MPs returning from the campaign trail, there is a far more corrosive issue for the party than Prescott’s sexual incontinence or the prisoner crisis. Across the country, backbenchers discovered that budget cuts in the National Health Service were making it increasingly difficult to argue that public services were safe in Labour hands, despite the money being pumped in. At the beginning of May the Pennine Acute trust in Greater Manchester said it was axing 800 jobs to help meet a deficit of £21m. Kennet & North Wiltshire and West Wiltshire Primary Care Trusts announced 80 job losses, while Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital warned that up to 450 jobs could go. For many MPs the survival of Patricia Hewitt was a slap in the face to activists who had faced open hostility on the doorstep. “How can there be any respect for a minister whose department is being run from Downing Street?” one activist said. “The NHS has become a proxy among supporters, voters and former voters for our confusion about what Labour stands for.”
In the end, all roads lead back to Blair. None but the most diehard defenders of the status quo in the health service argue that inefficient hospitals should continue to swallow up vast sums of public money without providing evidence of improvements to patient care. The issue is not reform itself, but the pace of change and the ability of existing structures to cope with it. By 2008 each trust will be paid a fixed sum for every admission, probably the most fundamental reform since the establishment of the NHS. The resignation of Jane Kennedy – in effect Hewitt’s deputy at the Department of Health – over the impact of payment-by-results on children’s hospitals, shows that even senior ministers are being ignored in the rush to push through reforms.
Some hope Gordon Brown will slow the pace of change to allow NHS trusts the time to adapt. Yet no one believes he will reverse the market reforms in health. Indeed, he and his closest allies are at least as committed to “contestability” in the public services as Blair and Hewitt. The PM and Chancellor may be split on the question of succession, but they are united on the power of the market to drive up standards in the health service.
Those who believe that a Brown leadership would transform Labour’s chances at the polls should look back at each of the crises of the past fortnight and ask if it would really have made a difference if he had been in post. His puritan streak might have led him to deal more ruthlessly with Prescott. He would have been less likely to rush to such a laughably draconian solution on offenders. But on health, Brown is as tainted as Blair. The policy differences are less acute than is the battle for power. On one point both sides agree: the longer this continues, the weaker the prospect that either man will be able to revive Labour’s fortunes.
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