Peter Oborne

Blair downgraded the Labour whips – and now he is paying the price

Blair downgraded the Labour whips – and now he is paying the price

Iin the immediate aftermath of the 2001 general election victory Tony Blair made a series of important organisational mistakes, for which he is still paying the price. Probably the most disastrous was the eviction of the government whips’ office from its historic base in 12 Downing Street. Alastair Campbell, director of communications, moved in with his media-handling entourage instead. Hilary Armstrong, the Chief Whip, spent the remainder of the summer scouring Whitehall for alternative accommodation. It was a humiliating state of affairs which immediately sent the message round Whitehall that the Chief Whip no longer counted.

The whips’ office had already been downgraded in other ways. Previous governments used the office as a training ground for rising stars. David Miliband, for example, would have been forced to serve two years’ hard labour with the whips rather than be plunged straight into a minister’s job. It would have done him good. Instead, New Labour fills up the whips’ office with the dullards and plodders. Worse still, it has been stripped of the power of patronage. All prime ministers before Tony Blair were broadly content to leave junior appointments in the hands of the Chief Whip. There were two reasons for this. First the whips, operating from the cockpit of Parliament rather than the isolation of No. 10, have a far better view of rising talent. Second, since the whips possessed the key to promotion, they had real powers over ambitious MPs at critical moments.

Nor was this all. The whips’ office also possessed power over other kinds of patronage: membership of quangos, a heavy input into the Honours List etc. This meant that the Chief Whip had at his or her disposal numerous tools of persuasion for use against not just younger, rising MPs but also older, passed-over MPs, disgruntled former ministers and so on.

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