Brown is not an ‘effing disaster’

‘Gordon has not been an effing disaster’

Fraser Nelson

22 September 2007

An interview with John Hutton

This Blairite language — patient v. producer — has been rejected by the Con�servatives, who instead say they will ‘trust the professionals’ by making the NHS independent of ministers. Mr Hutton says the Tories are a decade behind on a learning curve. ‘They are perhaps where we were ten years ago. But are we going to just sit there and watch them catch up with us? I don’t think so.’ Labour, he says, can and will ‘make it very hard for the Tories to be on this radical centre-ground’.

This phrase is telling. Ted Halstead’s The Radical Center is a book which was pored over by many Blairites at the last election, outlining policies which would transcend the political spectrum. This is precisely what Gordon Brown is attempting now. Either Mr Hutton is speaking conspicuously out of turn, or the Blairite philosophy has survived the transition to Brown. There is one buzzword which Mr Hutton uses with the same regularity as the rest of his Cabinet. Labour, he says, is about ‘aspiration’.

But what does this mean? ‘For me, aspiration is fundamentally about jobs and the opportunity to work in the area that you want to,’ he says, flatly. But with 15 per cent of the British workforce on out-of-work benefit, I ask, isn’t this offer being taken up by aspirational Poles and Czechs? ‘They are a small fraction of the workforce,’ he says. But he admits Labour ‘can do better’ in tackling welfare dependency ‘especially in the big cities’. Much of it, he says, is down to skills. ‘If we don’t train up our people locally, then jobs will go elsewhere and that will be a huge missed opportunity.’

At the Department of Work and Pensions, Mr Hutton specialised in hard truths. He spoke out in favour of two-parent families, and announced that benefit dependency causes poverty. I ask him about his most surprising declaration — when he was among eight ministers who in a single day in July confessed to smoking drugs in their youth.

It looked like a co-ordinated attempt to embarrass David Cameron, who famously refuses to comment on his youthful drug use. So what, I ask, was behind his confession? ‘When Jacqui Smith [the Home Secretary] said she smoked it, I didn’t want her to be out there on her own.’ So was it once? ‘No, a few times.’ And did he enjoy it? ‘Well...’ His adviser, sitting at the kitchen table with us, looks on in horror as his boss mulls how to finish the sentence. ‘Whatever,’ he says, finally. ‘But when I left university, I didn’t smoke dope. I had moved on from that.’

Mr Hutton has moved on, in many ways. In May, when he finished his first book Kitchener’s Men, unkind souls joked that he’d soon have a long retirement to write several sequels. But the Blairites have not become the splinter group many predicted. Mr Hutton is comfortable in the new regime, and is evidently preparing for the battles ahead. Only when those are over will he allow himself to spend more time researching battles of the past.