[A-List] UK state: the Blair succession

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Slowly, but with perceptible acceleration, the nails are being hammered into
the coffin of Blair's premiership. Yesterday Polly Toynbee was helpfully
reminding us about Peter Hain's resurrection of progressive taxation,
without of course mentioning Hain. Today another columnist examines the
Chinese water torture that is being applied to Blair's credibility, whilst
ex-Minister Michael Meacher casts doubt over the integrity of the latest
inquiry designed to get Tone off the hook. And it all would have been so
different had Al Gore been awarded the presidency in 2000. How Blair must
rue that turn of events. But he can hardly admit the reality that his
short-and-curlies were held tight by Bush, whose own survival may well
dictate the sacrifice of Tony, however unintended.

Nevertheless it is also clear that Blair has reached the stage of insanity
much quicker than did Thatcher. His pathological courting of controversy
whilst admitting no wrong shows a degree of recklessness that even Thatcher
in her latter stages eschewed. Her commitment to the poll tax was, at least,
principled. Tony the pragmatist offers us only his own personal integrity,
of which there is progressively little. Such is his inability to admit any
wrong that he was daft enough not to offer up Geoff Hoon as a sacrifice.
That shows a dangerous lack of self-preservation instinct and will only
intensify the preparations for the inevitable succession. Once Blair's
status as an electoral liability is established once and for all, the die
will be cast and thrust forward will be the potential successors who can,
ostensibly, persuade the party to back them. However the winner will be the
one that has the confidence of the hegemonic bloc and will benefit from the
favourable media coverage to see past the next election at least.

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Blair's trial by ordeal hasn't slaked his appetite for power

Post-Hutton, the prime minister's moral authority is in tatters

Jackie Ashley
Thursday February 5, 2004
The Guardian

Two things were obvious from yesterday's Commons debate on the Hutton
report. The first was Tony Blair's unshakeable self-belief that he was right
over Iraq and his critics were 100% wrong. Some polls - like that on Channel
4 News last week - may find that 90% of people thought Hutton was unfair.
But the prime minister is having none of it. The second was the palpable
anger and dismay among Labour MPs - including regular government critics
from Martin Salter to Dennis Skinner - about the reaction to the Hutton
report. With the government on the back foot, party loyalty has kicked in.

There's real anger among ministers in private, too, as they digested the
newspaper backlash to Hutton. For days I've found myself in arguments about
trust, betrayal, decency. "Why are we all treated as criminals?" asked one
senior minister. Well, one answer, as protesters who disrupted yesterday's
debate showed, is that some people passionately believe the government has
acted unlawfully. But this minister was speaking for many colleagues who
feel exasperated, depressed and confused about Labour's standing after the
war. Good people are talking about their regret that they ever entered
politics. And many other good people, card-carrying local enthusiasts who
helped get Blair elected in 1997, have long since slipped away.

Other ministers are more relaxed. Once Lord Hutton reported in such black
and white terms, they say they knew there would be a ferocious backlash from
the media. Now, as they expected, we are seeing the political backlash to
that backlash. Next the evidence from Dr Brian Jones, the former Ministry of
Defence expert on weapons of mass destruction, who suggested that
intelligence experts were over-ruled, will help power the backlash to the
backlash to the backlash. So the argument goes on, sloshing back and
forward, until a general narrative about what has happened becomes accepted.

Ministers hope that this will run out of steam. At present, that doesn't
look likely, with more questions being asked than answered - on both sides
of the Atlantic. But how will the country be changed by it in the longer
term?

It is still early days. So far, all that is obvious is that the prime
minister's attempt to find closure through the kind offices of Lord Hutton
has failed. Hutton lost on appeal to the country and thanks to David Kay,
the departing head of the Iraqi Survey Group, Blair was forced to announce
another inquiry. Thanks to Dr Jones, that inquiry is under pressure to
uncover fresh information.

On it goes. Andrew Gilligan's crude charge that Alastair Campbell minted
lies to con the Commons into voting for war has been rebutted, but the full
story remains mysterious. And because Downing Street and the White House
have been so intertwined, it is impossible for anyone in London, however
powerful, to control what happens next. You can agree the line round the
cabinet table ... but then Colin Powell opens his mouth.

Nor is the attempt to find closure only vulnerable to US interventions.
Let's not forget the obvious. Blair's standing is hostage to the situation
in Iraq itself, to the success or failure of suicide bombers, and to the
fragile process of creating a political settlement in Baghdad and Basra.
However many inquiries are ordered - and the prime minister noted that this
would be the fourth - the verdict of voters will depend on events in the
Middle East, as well as in Whitehall.

The row over the war in Iraq, and the Hutton inquiry that followed it, is
not a storm in a teacup. It is a climate-change inundation, flooding
familiar features and tearing up trees. After it, the landscape looks
different. What all the thinking ministers are trying to do is work out how
to survive there.

For it feels as if Labour in general, and the prime minister in particular,
has suffered a radical loss of authority. One minister asks: if Blair has
been cleared of everything by Hutton and is still portrayed as a liar and a
fraud, what does he do next? The prime minister has tried everything the
establishment rulebook suggests to help recover his moral authority - a law
lord, a cabinet secretary, a sackload of privy councillors,
cross-examination by MPs. He's thrown himself at lobby journalists in press
conferences, submitted to Paxman and radio phone-ins, revealed more evidence
about the workings of No 10 than any predecessor. In the Middle Ages they
called it trial by ordeal. And none of it has worked.

He could just go. Maybe he will. In Westminster coffee-bars the usual
rumours about a deal with Brown and departure in the summer, or the autumn
at the latest, can be picked up easily enough. But there's nothing new in
that, and in public Blair gives no sign of a loss of appetite for power. So
we have to work on the assumption that he wants to hang on for a third
victory.

There are two options. There is "Blair-plus" - yet more Blair on our screens
and yet more Blair radicalism for the government. The raft of "blue skies"
thinking revealed by the Guardian earlier this week shows us the world of
Blair-plus: charges for motorway lanes, charges for hospital "extras",
charges perhaps, one day, for schooling too. But it's more than policy.
Blair-plus also suggests that despite the tuition fees vote, the prime
minister will continue to challenge his party and rule as a presidential
figure, surrounded by advisers. He says he won't, but he will. I give him
the credit for not being able to change his spots. He may have told the
parliamentary Labour party that he intends to consult more, but few expect
him to change his personality. Blair the relaxed colleague and
parliamentarian leader is a fantasy. The dangers are obvious. They are
discussed every week on these pages.

The other option is Blair-minus, or the re-establishment of a more
conventional Labour administration. This means him pulling back a little -
he could ask Gordon Brown for lessons in periodic personal camouflage - and
deliberately allowing other ministers to take more credit and limelight. It
means accepting that the era of presidential rule, and policy-making by an
unelected clique, needs to be brought to a controlled stop.

It means acknowledging a wider political and public ecology in which power
is distributed among departments and institutions - in which the BBC is
genuinely independent, and the newspapers are forever irritating, and that's
life.

And, of course, it means relinquishing power in due course - but going
gently into that good night, rather than after some final, nail-biting
showdown. Ah, you may say, but that's hardly Blair's style. True, so far.
But I wonder whether, having escaped the perils of early 2004, he hasn't
turned his mind to a more dignified exit. After all, (swapping poets) it
will never be glad confident morning again.

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Selecting the selectors

The choice of who sits on an inquiry cannot be left to government

Michael Meacher
Thursday February 5, 2004
The Guardian

Given the widespread disquiet at Hutton's extraordinary lack of balance, a
wider question arises: how does the government fill such key roles at the
outset, and on what criteria? The key requirements should have been rigorous
independence and strict impartiality. But will these be fully met by the
appointment of Lord Butler's committee, with its convoluted terms of
reference and meetings to be held in secret? We must pay more attention to
how these committees are set up in the first place because the process by
which they're formed may influence much of the final report.

Both Lords Hutton and Butler were chosen by the prime minister acting on the
advice of senior officials. In my experience, most departments of state, and
also No 10, keep a voluminous catalogue of names in reserve for every kind
of high-level appointment. These include the so-called great and the good,
as well as very many others, and are selected mainly by senior aides and
officials, and occasionally by ministers.

>From this reservoir a range of potential names is selected where a key role
needs to be filled. Once a shortlist is agreed within the prime minister's
inner circle, advice and recommendations are put to him, and he makes the
final selection.

This process often works satisfactorily, and occasionally does not. An
obvious example is the Widgery inquiry into the Bloody Sunday killings, the
conclusions of which were so strongly disputed for a quarter of a century
that another inquiry had to be set up, under Lord Saville, to reassess the
evidence. But such cases are not confined to learned judges conducting solo
inquiries.

In the grey interface between politics and scientific expertise,
considerable effort is put into choosing chairpersons who, their academic
and technical merit notwithstanding, can be relied upon to deliver "safe"
verdicts which will not embarrass the government in sensitive areas of
policy. Their capability and integrity is not at issue; what can be called
into question is their independence from establishment influence.

This question of unequivocal independence is critical. Is it right that a
prime minister should select the person to conduct the inquiry and decide
his remit when his own actions are the subject for investigation?

I believe that on matters of overriding national strategic importance, most
notably where this country has been taken to war, the question of whether
there should later be a full inquiry into its causes and their handling, who
should conduct it, and what its terms of reference should be, ought to be
vested in a high-level constitutional body, as far as possible independent
of government influence. Its membership should be selected by parliament,
not by government.

But there is a snag here. Who selects the selectors? Whatever mechanism is
adopted to choose a high-level committee of this kind, how can it be done
without it being indirectly controlled by the government through its
majority in parliament? If the lesson of the Hutton saga is that unambiguous
independence of the executive and perceived balance in the conclusions are
the bottom line for carrying credibility, how can that be secured?

The public administration select committee has already decided to
investigate how inquiries are set up, how they are chosen and how they
operate. It could hardly be more timely. These issues can be resolved in the
US through the separation of powers between president and Congress, with
Congress retaining autonomous authority.

No such constitutional solution is available in the UK, where a single line
of authority proceeds from the prime minister all the way down through the
parliamentary system. If Hutton has done one thing, it is to expose this as
a constitutional issue which demands an answer.

· Michael Meacher was environment minister, 1997-2003