Now the real fight begins, and this time the Pentagon won’t help

The central proposition behind the government’s public-relations campaign since the end of the Iraq war is that Tony Blair has undergone some mid-life personality enhancement. We are now entreated to believe that the amiable, grinning weathercock to which we had grown accustomed has been replaced by a steely world leader. These claims do not square with the evidence of the last few weeks, during which the Prime Minister has attempted to steer the government back on to a domestic agenda.

Two weeks ago, at his latest Downing Street conference, the Prime Minister described public-service reform in the kind of portentous terms he hitherto reserved for the Iraq or Kosovo wars. He was banging the drum again on Tuesday over lunch with newspaper executives at the Savoy Hotel, insisting that failure to move radically would be ‘a collective mistake of absolutely historic proportions’. If that proposition is true, it is a mistake that the Prime Minister seems quite determined to make.

As The Spectator went to press, the exact size of the Labour rebellion over foundation hospitals, the vehicle chosen by Tony Blair to take us forward to the sunlit uplands of a modern health service, was unknown. But the numbers hardly matter. By the time MPs mustered in the division lobbies it had become clear that the Health and Social Care Bill, which plays midwife to these foundation hospitals, is above all a colossal failure of nerve.

One can dimly see what the Health Secretary Alan Milburn, now emerging as one of the characters of the second Blair administration, is trying to do. Some of his fellow Labour MPs distrust Milburn, viewing him as the political equivalent of Joe Lampton in Life at the Top, John Braine’s philandering working-class hero who is ready to ditch any principle and betray any friendship which stands in the way of his remorseless personal advancement.