|
> Home
> News cuttings >
Murphy’s Law
Yorkshire Post - July
2006
A friend, confident and aide to the Prime Minister is arrested – and yelps about the theatrical excess of the Police. A House of Commons committee is advised by a top police officer not to question the Prime Minister about the “cash for peerages” (or more picturesquely cash for coronets) affair: the Police might want to do that themselves. Two government ministers admit that they have been questioned by the Police – but, as if this were some redeeming virtue – not under caution.
And to crown it all President Vladimir Putin of Russia, getting his retaliation in first in response to western concerns about the state of Russian democracy, publicly mocks Tony Blair about the role of Lord Levy, the party’s cash and loan harvester.
A Daily Telegraph poll, meanwhile, reveals that the public regard the Labour Government as more corrupt – or “sleazy”- than its Tory predecessor. For someone who made such political capital out of “Tory sleaze” and turned “brown envelopes” (remember cash for questions, Neil Hamilton and all that??) into Labour votes, that blows a huge hole below the moral waterline.
A trio of British bankers, who look like they have done a crash course at the Max Clifford school of public relations, is dragged off to face jail in Texas under the terms of a treaty the US Congress refuses to sign. Genuine concerns about legal process are kneaded into the rich dough of resentment at Blair’s perceived subservience to American interests. Whatever the treatment of the men their wives will provide an elegiac commentary on the injustice of their treatment and the brutal indifference of the Blair government. Do we see all American justice in the malign arc-light of Guantanamo Bay?
To turn three fairly well-heeled bankers accused of fraud related to the Enron affair (the equivalent of the attack on the twin towers in shaking American belief in the integrity of its corporate existence) into popular martyrs took a performance of pure genius from Tony Blair. His mumblings under questioning in the Commons about the issue indicated a man deeply ill at ease.
Whilst the Prime Minister is beleaguered the sad pantomime of the deputy Prime Minister continues. John Prescott looks more and more like a hunted and corned animal, snapped at, ridiculed, taunted. First the “hands on” affair with the diary secretary, then the over-generous hospitality of the American billionaire Philip Anschutz who wants to turn the Dome into a casino and, constantly and inescapably, the questions about whether there were other liaisons. Surely his closest friends are telling him that the only way he and his party can get any respite is through resignation before even this Prime Minister fires him. A man who has lost all credibility is doing a job which appears to be devoid of all substance.
Whitehall is being rocked by the noise of policies being thrown overboard- or simply falling apart. Police mergers have been jettisoned: a plan which three months ago was essential to guarantee the security of British citizens is suddenly unaffordable and unnecessary. Leaks suggest that identity cards- another Government IT project begging for calamity – may not be long to follow. John Reid has realised that the only hope to get the Home Office back into business as a functioning government department is to ditch everything which is not yet a crisis in order to remedy the things which are.
Three Days to Save the NHS – proclaimed the Labour Party just before the 1997 election. Nearly a decade later after the “best year ever” for the NHS the Government is in danger of losing control of its flagship issue as the financial crisis closes hospitals, cuts referrals, and fires health staff.
Perhaps the electorate is already entrenched in its views on Iraq – already so corrosive of the Prime Minister’s repute amongst core Labour voters- but Afghanistan is emerging as a deadly menace. If there are comparisons with Vietnam I suspect that Afghanistan fits the match much more than Iraq. Utterly alien in culture and society, with barely a veneer of “western” attitudes, Afghanistan has consumed foreign armies over the centuries.
Iraq may be mightily contested as an intervention and Afghanistan command very broad consensus, but the prospect of Blair leaving office with two foreign wars consuming what the red-top papers and politicians call, emotively, “blood and treasure” looks near certain.
Fifteen months ago Labour won a handsome third election victory. The Tories then retired for six months to elect a new leader. Now that Government looks to be hugely disabled, factious, and mired in accusations of the shady practices it declared would never darken its door.
Insidiously the party is asking whether it really can pull things round with Gordon Brown. Gordon, with his lugubrious expression and worrying tick of dropping his jaw after every phrase, is part of the old regime in the mind of the electorate. He may be confident that his time has nearly come – and it is still almost impossible to see how he can be denied the top job at last – but he is parading through a shattered political landscape.
Under attack Blair tends to fight the battles of 1997 over again, reciting lists of doctors, nurses, operations, exam results, like one who has not seen that the issue has moved on to one of return on investment and competence. Brown will no doubt play to his economic strength and will bring a moral perspective to the international agenda.
David Cameron, meanwhile, is taking the Tories either into strange new territory or along entirely unmapped paths into old territory. Huskies and Hoodies – old issues addressed as alternative politics. He is letting Labour stew in its own juice.
The Government has a leader who is a liability, a deputy leader who is an embarrassment and a leader-in-waiting who speaks, almost desperately, of renewal and re-launch. There are some, not all of them in the ranks of an Opposition still incredulous at Labour’s capacity for self-destruction, who think that his task may just be to bring this government to an honourable end.
© Yorkshire Post
|
previous page