‘Gordon has not been an effing disaster’

It’s Sunday evening, and John Hutton has just come back from one of his regular weekend in Ypres. The Secretary of State for Business and Enterprise is an enthusiastic first world war amateur historian and is currently writing a play based on one of the stories he’s unearthed. It’s about John Elkington, a British colonel who surrendered without permission in the Somme in chaotic circumstances. He was court-marshalled and cashiered, but was so determined to keep fighting he joined the French Foreign Legion. His bravery eventually earned him a royal pardon.

It is the type of diehard martial spirit which many of Mr Hutton’s supporters once fancied they saw in him. This time last year, he was tipped as the ‘dark horse’ candidate to challenge Gordon Brown. He was seen as an ultra-Blairite, a champion of NHS reform and later pensions secretary regularly sent into battle with the Chancellor. He might stand against him, ran the argument, because he was so certain to be a victim of the Soviet-style purge set to follow Tony Blair’s departure.

But the purge never arrived. Mr Brown pledged a government of ‘all the talents’ and Mr Hutton remains in the Cabinet. As we sit in the kitchen of his west London home, I ask whether Mr Brown’s government has been what an anonymous Cabinet member — possibly Hutton himself — suggested in September 2006 would be an ‘effing disaster’? ‘No,’ he says, eyeing me suspiciously. ‘Not a disaster. A model, in fact. The secret of good politics is to disarm people, prove them wrong.’ And where Mr Brown has confounded critics, he says, is by uniting his party.

‘To understand why Labour’s so strong, you have to understand the legacy effects of being out of government for a generation,’ he says.