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Politics

Brown cares more about faction fights than the betrayal of 25 million citizens

Fraser Nelson

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Gordon Brown's attempt to control everything means he controls nothing

What makes all this so toxic for Mr Brown is that it fits a pattern. The appalling disclosure came the very day after Mr Darling had explained why taxpayers may not, after all, see the safe return of the £24 billion of their money that he lent to Northern Rock. It came a week after the Home Secretary’s confession that some 5,000 illegal immigrants had been cleared to work in security jobs, including the task of guarding the Prime Minister’s car. All this would be richly comic, were it not laden with such serious implications for so many.

The type of incompetence that makes our hospitals so dirty that Marks & Spencer is now selling special MRSA-resistant pyjamas is itself spreading across government. It has been said that HM Revenue & Customs should have treated the sensitive data as a vaccine laboratory would treat the contagion of a disease. This, alas, is precisely the problem. The CDs managed to escape with embarrassing ease, just as foot-and-mouth disease escaped in August from a government research facility.

The irony is that such chaos is unfolding around a Prime Minister who has given up none of his control-freak instincts, despite promises to the contrary. There are tales inside government of ministers shocked to receive an email out of the blue from Mr Brown himself, getting personally involved at a level of detail to which Tony Blair would never have stooped. Yet even a Stakhanovite like Mr Brown does not have the time to oversee every detail of government policy, much as he might like to. So he is becoming overwhelmed.

A dual critique of No. 10 Downing Street is now orthodox across Whitehall. On issues Mr Brown and his team choose to address, the extent of control is almost stifling. ‘It makes you wonder what the purpose of other advisers is, given that everything goes through his red pen,’ says one source. But in areas in which Mr Brown is not directly involved, there is nothing: no direction, no help, no approval or disapproval. When ministers decide to press ahead on their own, they risk being brutally slapped down.

This explains the dizzying number of U-turns being performed. There is no clear direction from No. 10 on the detention of terror suspects, for example, which is why Lord West, the security minister, changed his mind on the issue in an hour. Only when the Home Office floated a new detention limit of 58 days did No. 10 deliver the thumbs-down. Gerry Sutcliffe, the Sports Minister, learnt too late of Mr Brown’s displeasure when he attacked the ‘obscene’ salaries of footballers. His punishment came in newspaper diary columns, one of the standard conduits now for vengeance.

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Julian Cox

November 23rd, 2007 2:13pm

Having quite rightly behaved like a dog with a juicy bone over the election fiasco, why is it that now there is something over which the nation does in fact have every right to be consulted - a clearly incompetent administration without an electoral mandate - Cameron and the Conservative front bench are silent on the issue? We should immediately turn to our friends in the Country Alliance to find a hound desperate for the smell of blood and capable of going into full cry. There can't be so great a carbon pawprint over a can of Chum, can there? Never was there a stronger case for a concerted campaign to let the people choose. If it is not parties that win elections but governments that lose them, Brown would be sent to the gulag of electoral opprobrium that he alone has created. Unleash the pack from the kennels!

J ogden

November 25th, 2007 7:20pm

The reason brown put darling as chancelor is he could not do the job of the transport minister properly make a mess of one and promote them to a higher post how dense can one get.by the way have we got a m.p called blair is it right he is in the middle east i wonder what he will get up to nexst/

John O'Kane

November 28th, 2007 8:03am

"...reputation for competence"????

A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

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Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

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‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.