Zen and the Art of a Pm
The papers may be screaming about Steelgate, a part-privatised air traffic control system in danger of going belly-up, a civil war in the Department of Transport - but the folks at Number 10 can see none of it.
There may be troubles ahead - but none that is visible from Downing Street's window.
The papers may be screaming about Steelgate, a part-privatised air traffic control system in danger of going belly-up, the state of the railways, "third world" wards in the hospitals, a civil war in the Department of Transport, a growing rift between Europe and the US, and a government showing alarming signs of drift - but the folks at Number 10 can see none of it.
For them the outlook is sunny. While everyone else is putting up umbrellas, the prime minister continues to turn his face upward to bask in the golden rays. For him, there is not a cloud in the sky.
Hugo Young described the PM's insouciance towards the US-Europe rift on Iraq on these pages yesterday, but the word applies on the home front just as much.
Tony Blair may have broken one of the iron laws of politics last week - no politician should ever let the word "Watergate" knowingly pass his lips and never, ever attach it to himself - but his insistence that the row over Lakshmi Mittal was "more Garbagegate than Watergate" is wholly typical of the current Downing Street mentality. Those around him may be flapping, but Mr Blair is breezy, breezy, breezy.
So the Mittal affair, he believes, is a five-day wonder - 10 days, max. No one will lay a glove on the PM because he didn't do anything wrong. He didn't know the letter he was signing had anything to do with a Labour donor and even if he had, he would have signed it anyway: giving to the Labour party is not a crime.
Besides, he writes letters like this all the time. Aides point out that European leaders do similar lobbying for business every day of the week; often they send ministers to act as super-salesmen, just to close the deal.
This tea-cup storm will soon blow over; the press will get bored of it, they always do. (The public seem to be with Number 10 on this one: according to yesterday's Guardian/ICM poll, 54% think the Mittal allegations have made no difference to Blair's personal standing.)
What of the perennial, unshifting problems of the public services? Once again, from the Olympian height of Downing Street all looks well. Indeed Blair thinks his government is doing much better now than a year ago when, ironically enough, ministers were perceived as energetic but were actually still working out what to do. Now he's much happier with the way things are going.
For all the January fuss about Rose Addis, he reckons health is shaping up, reaching the point now where education was 18 months ago: extra investment paying off, improvements at last becoming visible to the public. People's experience of the health service is actually pretty good. Sure, there will always be the odd horror story; with the NHS treating 1m patients every 36 hours, what else do you expect? But NHS managers support the government's health plan and, remember, now is only the second year that increased money has flowed in, after years of chronic under- investment. Message: be patient, we're getting there - and the overall strategy of investment and reform remains sound.
But surely transport's a bit of a nightmare? No, most of the trains are working fine. Not worried by the new militancy in the unions? No, most of the strikes have not materialised. A lot of the public sector unions might make a song and dance, but in their hearts they know the government's reform plans are right. And their members will soon tire of the newly elected generation of hardline, leftist leaders because they won't get results.
You scratch your head awhile, desperate to think of something that might keep the prime minister up at night. Perhaps he is troubled by Asian reaction to David Blunkett's remarks about arranged marriages, which many took as a government edict on who Asians should or should not marry. But no. Mr Blair thinks people on the ground are not as sensitive on this topic as their media champions.
In other words, all is rosy on Planet Blair. Those who see problems are either impatient scribblers desperate for a story or Tory wreckers out to destroy public faith in the capacity of government to do good. There is a defence for this view - but some serious risks attached to it, too.
In its favour is the plain fact that results cannot be immediate when turning around the aged, creaky supertankers of our public services. Transforming schools and hospitals is a decades-long business and if there are few instant results, and several setbacks along the way, that's in the nature of the task.
Of course, waiting is boring. Journalists can't stand it, itching for a story; politicians get irritated, eager for progress to announce and brag about. So perhaps Mr Blair's Zen state of calm is the only rational approach to the gradualist long haul that is public policy.
But there is a risk to such cool. For "relaxed" can slide rapidly into "out-of-touch" if the rest of the country is impatient for progress. Mr Blair's predecessor as Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, paid a high price for being Sunny Jim even in the face of the winter of discontent: "Crisis, what crisis?" haunted him all the way to his 1979 defeat.
George Bush's father suffered the same fate in 1992 when he was deemed terminally out of touch with America's economic pain, unable to answer a voter's inquiry as to how the recession had affected him personally. He, too, said everything was fine - and the rising tide in economic numbers backed him up. But the mood was anxious, and he was out of step with it.
Tony Blair hardly needs to be taught this lesson. He learned it for himself in 2000, when a September fuel protest forced him to reassure the nation that he was listening and could still feel its pulse. He is not going to have to repeat that speech just yet.
That moment only comes when both media and public are in chorus: the potency of the fuel protests was their combination of red-top pressure and citizen action. For now, as yesterday's Guardian poll suggested, the media are not speaking for the public majority in rounding on the government. But that could change at dizzying speed.
And New Labour is especially vulnera ble. Margaret Thatcher could weather setbacks and storms, even long periods without results, because voters had a clear idea of her destination. "If it isn't hurting, it isn't working," she would say, ingeniously suggesting that high unemployment and recession were the nasty taste that proved her strategy was economic medicine. Amazingly, the worse things were, the more they seemed to confirm she was doing something radical to cure Britain's long-term health.
It was quite a trick, but Mr Blair has no equivalent. He has not set out a simple philosophy which might be understood as the guiding star of his administration. Instead he is undertaking a battery of often complex reforms, different in each area.
There is no simple storyline to get us through the long wait for change, except the one that asks us to put our trust in the good faith and wise counsel of the leader - and to see the future as brightly as he does.
j.freedland@guardian.co.uk
The papers may be screaming about Steelgate, a part-privatised air traffic control system in danger of going belly-up, the state of the railways, "third world" wards in the hospitals, a civil war in the Department of Transport, a growing rift between Europe and the US, and a government showing alarming signs of drift - but the folks at Number 10 can see none of it.
For them the outlook is sunny. While everyone else is putting up umbrellas, the prime minister continues to turn his face upward to bask in the golden rays. For him, there is not a cloud in the sky.
Hugo Young described the PM's insouciance towards the US-Europe rift on Iraq on these pages yesterday, but the word applies on the home front just as much.
Tony Blair may have broken one of the iron laws of politics last week - no politician should ever let the word "Watergate" knowingly pass his lips and never, ever attach it to himself - but his insistence that the row over Lakshmi Mittal was "more Garbagegate than Watergate" is wholly typical of the current Downing Street mentality. Those around him may be flapping, but Mr Blair is breezy, breezy, breezy.
So the Mittal affair, he believes, is a five-day wonder - 10 days, max. No one will lay a glove on the PM because he didn't do anything wrong. He didn't know the letter he was signing had anything to do with a Labour donor and even if he had, he would have signed it anyway: giving to the Labour party is not a crime.
Besides, he writes letters like this all the time. Aides point out that European leaders do similar lobbying for business every day of the week; often they send ministers to act as super-salesmen, just to close the deal.
This tea-cup storm will soon blow over; the press will get bored of it, they always do. (The public seem to be with Number 10 on this one: according to yesterday's Guardian/ICM poll, 54% think the Mittal allegations have made no difference to Blair's personal standing.)
What of the perennial, unshifting problems of the public services? Once again, from the Olympian height of Downing Street all looks well. Indeed Blair thinks his government is doing much better now than a year ago when, ironically enough, ministers were perceived as energetic but were actually still working out what to do. Now he's much happier with the way things are going.
For all the January fuss about Rose Addis, he reckons health is shaping up, reaching the point now where education was 18 months ago: extra investment paying off, improvements at last becoming visible to the public. People's experience of the health service is actually pretty good. Sure, there will always be the odd horror story; with the NHS treating 1m patients every 36 hours, what else do you expect? But NHS managers support the government's health plan and, remember, now is only the second year that increased money has flowed in, after years of chronic under- investment. Message: be patient, we're getting there - and the overall strategy of investment and reform remains sound.
But surely transport's a bit of a nightmare? No, most of the trains are working fine. Not worried by the new militancy in the unions? No, most of the strikes have not materialised. A lot of the public sector unions might make a song and dance, but in their hearts they know the government's reform plans are right. And their members will soon tire of the newly elected generation of hardline, leftist leaders because they won't get results.
You scratch your head awhile, desperate to think of something that might keep the prime minister up at night. Perhaps he is troubled by Asian reaction to David Blunkett's remarks about arranged marriages, which many took as a government edict on who Asians should or should not marry. But no. Mr Blair thinks people on the ground are not as sensitive on this topic as their media champions.
In other words, all is rosy on Planet Blair. Those who see problems are either impatient scribblers desperate for a story or Tory wreckers out to destroy public faith in the capacity of government to do good. There is a defence for this view - but some serious risks attached to it, too.
In its favour is the plain fact that results cannot be immediate when turning around the aged, creaky supertankers of our public services. Transforming schools and hospitals is a decades-long business and if there are few instant results, and several setbacks along the way, that's in the nature of the task.
Of course, waiting is boring. Journalists can't stand it, itching for a story; politicians get irritated, eager for progress to announce and brag about. So perhaps Mr Blair's Zen state of calm is the only rational approach to the gradualist long haul that is public policy.
But there is a risk to such cool. For "relaxed" can slide rapidly into "out-of-touch" if the rest of the country is impatient for progress. Mr Blair's predecessor as Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, paid a high price for being Sunny Jim even in the face of the winter of discontent: "Crisis, what crisis?" haunted him all the way to his 1979 defeat.
George Bush's father suffered the same fate in 1992 when he was deemed terminally out of touch with America's economic pain, unable to answer a voter's inquiry as to how the recession had affected him personally. He, too, said everything was fine - and the rising tide in economic numbers backed him up. But the mood was anxious, and he was out of step with it.
Tony Blair hardly needs to be taught this lesson. He learned it for himself in 2000, when a September fuel protest forced him to reassure the nation that he was listening and could still feel its pulse. He is not going to have to repeat that speech just yet.
That moment only comes when both media and public are in chorus: the potency of the fuel protests was their combination of red-top pressure and citizen action. For now, as yesterday's Guardian poll suggested, the media are not speaking for the public majority in rounding on the government. But that could change at dizzying speed.
And New Labour is especially vulnera ble. Margaret Thatcher could weather setbacks and storms, even long periods without results, because voters had a clear idea of her destination. "If it isn't hurting, it isn't working," she would say, ingeniously suggesting that high unemployment and recession were the nasty taste that proved her strategy was economic medicine. Amazingly, the worse things were, the more they seemed to confirm she was doing something radical to cure Britain's long-term health.
It was quite a trick, but Mr Blair has no equivalent. He has not set out a simple philosophy which might be understood as the guiding star of his administration. Instead he is undertaking a battery of often complex reforms, different in each area.
There is no simple storyline to get us through the long wait for change, except the one that asks us to put our trust in the good faith and wise counsel of the leader - and to see the future as brightly as he does.
j.freedland@guardian.co.uk
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