Britannia Radio

Hole at the heart of government

By Sue Cameron

Published: September 2 2008 19:48 | Last updated: September 2 2008 19:48

Is the government imploding or does it just look that way? Downing Street advisers have their heads in their hands, I’m told. Tribal warfare has broken out in Whitehall with the Treasury and Number 10 indulging in more or less open war. Insiders say Prime Minister Gordon Brown has a multi-billion pound shopping list of plans, including state-backed mortgages, which he is saving up to announce in his speech to the Labour conference later this month.

Yet he has not cleared all these proposals with Chancellor Alistair Darling and apparently even ultra-loyal Brownites are complaining that he will not take advice from anyone – neither from political aides nor officials. Discipline is non-existent. Everyone blames everyone else. Nobody seems in charge.

One incident demonstrates the atmosphere and the nature of the problem. Tory leader David Cameron went to beleaguered Georgia to offer comfort in the face of the Russian invasion. He went before any government minister and when Mr Brown was told he was beside himself. Yet his first question was not how best to respond. Instead he demanded: “How on earth was this allowed to happen?” Advisers pointed out that they could not control the opposition leader but the PM’s anger was not assuaged and he continued pacing up and down furiously.

What worries Whitehall is that nobody seems certain what to do about the problems crowding in on the government. “If you think this lot have a Baldrick-style cunning plan you are flattering them,” says Professor Peter Hennessy of London University. “A lot of the people in Number 10 – notably the spads or special advisers – aren’t house-trained. They don’t know what everyone is meant to be doing.”

Martin Weale, head of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, agrees that too many Downing Street people don’t have clear, non-overlapping jobs. He would like to see more civil service advisers and fewer “outsiders in poorly defined roles”. He says statements on the economy should be made in parliament by the chancellor. “It’s not the PM’s job to make economic announcements but whether we’ll ever get back to constitutional government again, I’m not sure.”

It’s a view that many in Whitehall would echo. Yet the man who was meant to sort out the management of Downing Street was an outsider – former marketing man Stephen Carter, who was made the PM’s chief adviser. Now it seems he is to be sidelined. Few insiders are surprised. They point out that he had virtually no experience of government or the Labour party. “Downing Street is a court,” said one insider. “It’s about individual power and you mustn’t go thinking its logical. You can’t turn a court into a corporation.”

He added that courts are about power flows – and when power starts leaving the king, potential successors start to appear. There has certainly been speculation about a reshuffle with talk of Darling being replaced by schools secretary Ed Balls (“Ed?” said one sceptical Whitehall man. “Think Gordon Brown without the charm.”) Yet a different chancellor would face the same problem of a weakened Treasury, trying to rebuild its credibility while the PM continually interferes. Professor Hennessy says PMs often fail in the very areas where they have expertise: Eden, the foreign affairs expert, faced Suez; Callaghan, son of the Labour movement, had the winter of discontent; Thatcher, champion of the ratepayers, came to grief over poll tax. Will the economy prove Mr Brown’s nemesis?

Too much pud

A passionate defence of America and the American way of life comes in a new book by Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor. The book, Have a Nice Day, attacks critics of the US for claiming on the one hand that Americans are imperialists planning world domination and on the other that they have not the foggiest idea about the outside world. Mr Webb insists that the critics cannot have it both ways. Yet he understands where they are coming from.

“The signature pudding dish in the cafeteria of the Bush White House was called Chocolate Freedom,” he tells us. “It has a chocolate base, an ice cream middle and was topped with sparklers. The parallel between the chocolate version of freedom and the policy version as cooked up by the White House is obvious: both were confections designed to appeal to American palates, neither had much of a sense of permanence about it and too much of either appeared to make you sick.”

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