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Resolve
Local Government
Chronicle - 18 December 2006
2007. Regime change. A re-invigorated, re-directed, re-focussed Labour Government under Gordon Brown or the frantic, faltering, fading last years of New Labour? Does the public think it matters whether the organ-grinder or the monkey is in charge?
Regime change in France too. What price a sexy Socialist, Segolene Royal, to replace the dismal and devious Jacques Chirac? A determinedly unmarried mother-of-four (with a partner going back to student days) she looks the dream A-List candidate for the Cameron Conservatives. I bet Gordon Brown would be much more comfortable with her neo-Gaullist opponent Nicolas Sarkozy, son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, a man whose burning ambition to get the top job is matched only by Gordon Brown’s burning ambition to get the top job.
Regime half-change has already happened in Germany. Like Gordon Brown the German Chancellor is a child of the Manse – in her case a dour existence in Communist East Berlin. But Merkel – the first woman and the first Easterner to win German’s top job- is locked in a muscle-bound coalition with her Social Democrat opponents. Given Brown’s palpable impatience with Continental consensus politics which makes economic reform so painstakingly hesitant I can’t see him popping over for long weekends at an agreeable watering hole.
Regime change concentrates the mind wonderfully. This is especially so amongst the putative winners and losers. So the New Year wishes this January may have been even more fervent than usual amongst the local government aficionados.
Step forward Ruth Kelly. Her most pressing wish is simple- survival. Ruth is undoubtedly seriously bright. With four children and a big job she would also be on the Tory A List (though whether a Tory constituency association would select her is another matter!) Her problem is that she never gives the impression of being really at ease. Adrift on the cross-currents between the Blair and Brown camps, she has been condemned to a constant wait for yet another of the weighty reports the Chancellor is keeps commissioning.
Not so Yvette Cooper. Despite a reputation for being a hesitant decision-taker and slow digester of dossiers she looks to be sitting pretty. Of late she has used her planning brief to turn herself into Kate Barker’s little helper (Barker’s second Brown-commissioned great tome, on the planning system, has just thumped off the printing presses to go with her housing testament). She is married to Ed Balls, Gordon’s alter ego and therapist, and it is possible that we could see two Balls in the cabinet (assuming that ermine will be waved in front of the occupant of a safe Labour seat around the Yorkshire stretch of the A1 to make way for Balls whose own seat is disappearing.)
David Miliband might be pulling on the festive wish-bone more anxiously than most. Gordon Brown’s minimal action on green taxes (Chelsea tractors escaped unscathed after all – who wants to intrude on a Middle England’s love affair?) has left him looking out of sorts after his own public advocacy of radical measures. It also makes his avowal to “out-green” David Cameron look a bit hollow. The Milibands have, however, hedged their bets. Younger brother Ed is a Brown acolyte. If Alan Johnson were to win the deputy leadership David Miliband might fancy his chances of returning to Education whilst Ed would expect to move up the political food-chain.
Mary Tudor said that when she died people would find the word Calais written across her bosom. Ruth Kelly is entitled to make the same claim of Sir Michael Lyons. If Sir Michael makes a New Year wish it must, surely, be to be allowed to publish and be damned - without hesitation, deviation, repetition, addition or qualification. The report looks like making A la recherché du temps perdu look snappy. Waiting for Lyons has become the cargo cult to end all cargo cults. Let’s hope the report comes with a very usable executive summary!
But it will inevitably be a slow burner. By the time the Government has responded, drawn up proposals, consulted, drafted and legislated we could be well into 2008 if not beyond. And then the next general election will already be looming.
General elections are wonderful ways of concentrating the mind!
Happy New Year.
© Local Government Chronicle
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