Politics | 21 February 2009

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

The worst thing about this week for Gordon Brown is that no one has bothered to dub it his worst week ever. Normally, a few days which saw a Prime Minister receive the succession of blows that Brown has suffered since Saturday would lead to forests being chopped down and extra barrels of newsprint being ordered in. But we have now reached a political moment where it can be revealed that the government is reduced to querying David Cameron’s name when it appears on Number 10 party guest lists, a key government policy adviser defects to the Tories, someone ‘quite close to the inner core’ (rumoured to be Harriet Harman) floats the idea that Brown will quit to go and head up a new international body, and the Tories open up a 20-point poll lead — and it is treated as business pretty much as usual. Even the obvious tension between Peter Mandelson’s comments in a speech in New York on Tuesday that governments must not ‘be pushed into hurried judgments’ on bankers’ bonuses, and the Chancellor’s hurried announcement on the very same topic, failed to attract much attention.

This lack of interest is explained by the fact that nearly everyone in Westminster now thinks this government is done. On the Tory side, the conversation is all about how they should run things in office, and whether Tony Blair went too far or not far enough in politicising the government machine. On the Labour side, it is about where the party should go in the leadership election that will follow the coming defeat. Brown, to borrow a phrase used by another former chancellor, is in office but not in power.

So quickly are the tectonic plates shifting that even Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet secretary who was permanent secretary at the Treasury for much of Brown’s chancellorship, is apparently letting it be known that his time at Number 10 has persuaded him of the need for radical reform of the way government works.

When David Cameron kisses hands at Buckingham Palace and is asked to form a government, he will be inheriting not only a broken society but a busted economy and a military that has been running hot for almost a decade.