The Prime Minister launched an initiative this week to promote longevity with the aid of a few well-chosen lifestyle adjustments. Mr Blair will, apparently, consume more water with his one real vice — drinking too much tea and coffee — and walk up stairs instead of taking the lift.
If only his political staying power, as a leader who has expressed the fervent wish to serve a full third term, were so easily guaranteed. Mr Blair co-opted the Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, fresh from a mauling in Gateshead by the main health union (now there’s a bad day out) as his partner in the Longer Life initiative. Mrs Hewitt might have a thought or two about her own political mortality as she walks up the stairs at her department to another day of hospital trust deficits, nursing staff redundancies and agitating health unions.
Charles Clarke has certainly had his own memento mori as he revealed that the Home Office had managed to lose more than 1,000 convicted foreign criminals who should have been considered for deportation. What would we not give to hear Mr Clarke receiving the original telephone call from officials? ‘Paedophiles, murderers and rapists? Aha, apart from the kidnappers and robbers obviously. And how did we manage to lose them exactly?’
Oh, and the Deputy PM John Prescott has been having an office affair, which is not an image the mind wants to linger upon.
Next week sees the first electoral test of Blair’s third term and roughly coincides with its first year in office. Short of a plague of frogs in Downing Street, the government could not be entering an electoral test against a popular new Tory leader at a less propitious time.
The most damaging charge now levelled at this government is not that it is arrogant or goes to war unwisely or changes too much or too little on the domestic front — depending upon your view — but that it is serially incompetent and cannot manage its own reforms. Or indeed the basic day-to-day business of keeping known foreign criminals away from the rest of us.
The other sign of internal disarray was the ‘best year for the NHS’ claim by Mrs Hewitt. A ludicrous statement — but also the sign of a minister under serious strain and misjudging the effect of her words in an attempt to appear robust. Her point was that Labour has invested more in the past year than ever before and that the numbers of doctors and nurses in the NHS are at an all-time high. But this is not what is in question. What is in question is the government’s ability to foresee the crunch points inherent in a reform programme intended to shake out the manifest inefficiencies and to prepare for them.
Anyway, it is quite something to ask the voter in Camden, a key central London seat where Labour is struggling to avoid humiliation, or in a North West marginal or in a hard-fought Midlands seat, to think through all of this and keep the faith. To say nothing of the ‘loanations’ scandal in which Mr Blair contrived not only to circumvent the rules he introduced, but to have the donors turned down by the Lords Appointments Committee when they were nominated for peerages, re-awakening the allegations of Labour sleaze, leading to a criminal investigation and causing a black hole in the party finances now that they want their money back.
That is drawing a veil (as many Labour voters certainly won’t) over the Iraq aftermath, which has been appallingly bloody and dispiriting even to stolid supporters of the war like myself. And the general wear and tear of nine years in office enlivened by a rumbling war of succession with Gordon Brown.
The mood around Mr Blair in the election run-up has been curiously stoical — though Wednesday’s Clarke–Prescott double whammy is shaking even the strongest nerves in the bunker.
The aim has been to turn next Thursday’s campaign into a purely local affair dominated by local concerns — the so-called ‘wheelie-bin strategy’. Mr Clarke was adamant that it is not to be seen as a ‘referendum on the government’. Well, you can see why. But while the mosaic of local politics does figure, local elections also reflect something more profound. Mrs Thatcher’s 1990 bloodying and departure later that year, and the further Tory doldrums under John Major in 1994, reflect that. They rarely cause an immediate sea-change — but they often deepen schisms and accelerate power shifts.
One No. 10 trusty says that the real problem is not the target seats, into which every breathing Labour activist has been hurled. ‘We have to brace for a shock in the Labour “safe seats”, which might well suddenly go to the Lib Dems or even the Tories.’ They know that anything could happen and that next week could see Labour’s vote slip-sliding away in quite a dramatic fashion.
But the same source compares New Labour with John Howard’s relationship with the Australian electorate. Mr Howard is widely disliked but he keeps getting elected. In other words: he’s an old git we don’t like very much, but he’s our old git. Mr Blair is quite happy to muddle on in this spirit. Past caring whether he is liked, he privately concedes that he spent too much capital in his early years on being universally admired, and too little on pressing ahead with the changes with which he wants to define his last period in government. ‘It’s the end of the love affair,’ says a senior aide flatly. ‘This is a long marriage with the electorate and now there is a kind of acceptance of the ups and downs of a long life together. There is nothing in the polls to suggest that they want him gone now.’
But polls are not so much fickle as given to sudden avalanches. ICM this week registers a two-point Labour fall, but to the advantage of the Lib Dems, not Mr Cameron. A really bad set of local elections, coupled with the spectacle of a government falling apart at the seams, is unlikely to sustain such a benevolent picture for long. But another Labour strategist concludes that after the usual ‘Blair Must Go Now’ flurries following what he says will be ‘a perfectly ghastly election for us’, the government will grit its teeth and carry on as normal. If you can call it that.
You could conclude two things here. This lot are in complete denial about how bad things really are, and that Mr Blair will, as Mrs Thatcher did, soon leave office in the glazed stupor of an enforced departure as his government disintegrates. Or you might think that Labour can still just about get away with this shambles because — bottom line — there is no economic crisis and the country is in no great hurry for Gordon Brown, who is the only real alternative.
Next week the kaleidoscope could shift to a different pattern entirely. The truly odd thing is that for all the growing chaos of this government, so few inside it really think it will.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of the London Evening Standard.