More from The Week

A sense of stagnation has descended upon the House of Commons. The king is dead, and yet the new king will not be enthroned for weeks. Nothing much can happen in the meantime. After delivering his latest farewell speech, Tony Blair is still making spectral appearances around the country for purposes no one is quite able to establish. Labour MPs sit around in groups, distracting themselves with the folly of the deputy leadership race. Neither they, nor anyone else in Westminster, have anything useful to do. The only show in town is Gordon Brown. The Chancellor has been a turbine of activity. He has been giving speeches, entering debates, glad-handing pensioners and starring in one £10-a-ticket show entitled ‘The Man Behind the Politics’.

It ends, as it began, with a political conjuring trick. The splicing together of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness must, by any standards, rank as one of the most extraordinary achievements in recent politics, and reflects, among other things, the sleepless kinetic force that was Tony Blair’s greatest asset. It was the same force that pushed through the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, as Mr Blair promised to reconcile the irreconcilable, square the circle, plot the uncharted ‘Third Way’. In Ulster, he has been rewarded. But the method failed him more often than not. Even before he was elected, the Labour leader swore that he could pump money into Britain’s public services without raising taxes: more than 100 tax increases later, those words seem laughable.

It is bleakly symmetrical that Tony Blair’s tenth anniversary as Prime Minister should have fallen in the same week as the Scottish, Welsh and local elections. But it was no less apt that the PM should have passed this milestone the day after the conviction of five British Islamists who plotted to blow up a crowded nightclub or shopping centre: the fruits of Operation ‘Crevice’ by the police and security services in 2004. The contrast between the sunlit expectations of 2 May 1997 and the angry mood of the electorate this week could scarcely be sharper. The Blair decade has been one of dashed expectations. But it has also been a period of geopolitical and cultural transformation.

An Englishman’s home is his castle, but his wheelie bin is not far behind as a symbol of domestic independence. So it is no surprise that the spread of fortnightly, rather than weekly, rubbish collection has stirred such strong emotions. In the midst of soaring April temperatures, the prospect of stinking piles of black bags, pecked at by rats and birds, is vile indeed. A government that lectures the electorate about ‘respect’ and antisocial behaviour cannot be complacent about a trend that risks bringing the hygiene standards of the shanty town to thousands of streets. Jim Callaghan never actually said ‘Crisis? What crisis?’, but the headline captured his jovial detachment from the collapse of basic amenities in Britain.

A stealth tax, by definition, is one in which political pain is deferred in return for immediate gain. The Chancellor who imposes such a tax effectively mortgages his credibility and the public’s trust in him. But, sooner or later, as Gordon Brown is discovering, the day of reckoning arrives — in Mr Brown’s case, at the worst possible moment, as he prepares to enter No. 10, and to fend off a serious challenge for the Labour leadership. Thanks to dogged Freedom of Information inquiries by the Times, we now know that Mr Brown was warned by his Treasury officials in 1997 that his decision to abolish dividend tax credits for pension funds would provoke ‘clamour and public consternation.... Ministers’ postbags will be pretty full.

In a famous Spectator article of 17 January 1964, Iain Macleod denounced the ‘magic circle’ of senior Conservatives who had engineered the succession of Lord Home as prime minister the year before. The Crown was obliged to follow the advice tendered by Harold Macmillan, Macleod concluded, ‘but the result of the methods used was contradiction and misrepresentation. I do not think it was a precedent that will be followed.’ He was right. Since the election of Edward Heath in 1965, every Tory leader, with the exception of Michael Howard in 2003, has been chosen in a full-blown democratic contest. Twice since Home, there has been a change of Prime Minister without a general election.

‘A Budget for business’ was how — as usual — it was spun beforehand. ‘A Budget to expand prosperity and fairness for Britain’s families’ was how the speech actually began. But this week’s 11th and final performance from Labour’s longest-serving Chancellor was in reality neither of these things: it was a Budget for Brown. The price Gordon Brown has paid for the exceptional length of his Treasury tenure and the exceptional strength of his grip on every other part of domestic government is that on Wednesday he was left with very little to say about policy and economic performance that he had not already said many times before.

To adapt Macaulay, there is no spectacle so ridiculous as the Labour party in one of its periodic fits of ideology. While the heir-presumptive, Gordon Brown, has remained in old-fashioned purdah about his plans as prime minister, the jostling candidates to be his deputy leader have engaged in a shrill and often juvenile battle to win the favour of the Labour movement. Peter Hain has railed against the ‘super-rich class’, conveniently forgetting that it is the generation of wealth, rather than socialist conviction, that subsidises the welfare state. Harriet Harman promises a ‘living link’ with the trade unions, which sounds more like a dead hand upon competitiveness. Hilary Benn, Jack Straw and Hazel Blears have added to the cacophony.