Peter Oborne

A peculiar arrangement prevailed in 8th-century France, during the final decades of the Merovingian dynasty. The power of the kings, once savage and formidable, had subsided and then collapsed. They continued to enjoy the title of monarch, but the real power was exercised by officers of the royal household, the so-called ‘mayors of the palace’. The mayors ruled, while the Merovingians, who were regarded with contempt, occupied a purely formal and instrumental role. This pattern of indirect rule, with its separation of real and titular authority, is by no means unique. Japanese emperors in the 9th century ruled in name only. The Fujiwaras, a dynasty of court officials, exercised the real power though they were content to maintain and honour the throne.

Next Thursday Tony Blair will be re-elected with a fairly generous margin of victory: not less than a 50-seat majority, but probably not much more than 100. The Tories will make some progress, but not much. Anything more than 200 seats after 5 May, and Central Office should open a small case of champagne. This comparative failure is by no means a matter for despair. The Conservatives have fought a sound campaign. The personal performance of Michael Howard is beyond praise. He has shown stamina, resilience and guts. Twice he has faced desperate situations, once when he took over the Tory leadership in late 2003, then again in November last year, when everything seemed on the verge of collapse. Each time he fought back. Howard has imposed discipline and made no sloppy errors.

Jim Callaghan, who died last Saturday, was the last British prime minister in the commonly accepted sense of the word. After him several factors — the degradation of the Gladstonian idea of a disinterested Civil Service, the collapse of Parliament, the emergence of a professional political elite and the rise of the media class were four of the most important — irrevocably changed the nature of the post. In other words Jim Callaghan was the last prime minister from the long age of representative democracy in Britain, which stretched roughly from 1867, the date of the Second Reform Act, till the general election of 1979 and the emergence of Margaret Thatcher as a presidential type of political leader. Before 1867 Britain was governed by an aristocracy.

By far the most interesting event of this week was the serialisation of the diaries of Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror. Ebury Press paid more than £1 million for this work, while the Daily Mail unloaded £250,000 on the serialisation alone. Piers Morgan is one of a circle of louche, not always savoury characters who have hung around Downing Street since the inception of the Blair regime in 1997, betraying the Blairs and being betrayed in return, in conditions of irredeemable moral squalor. This group includes party donors, lawyers, tabloid newspaper editors, PR men and a New Age therapist. It has come to define the Blair era as decisively as Joe Kagan and George Wigg defined Harold Wilson, or David Mellor and Jeffrey Archer set their seal on John Major.

Shortly before Christmas last year I went off to write a book about a malign modern trend, the rise of political lying. Regrettably, during the two months I have been absent, the lying has continued unabated. In other respects, however, British politics has changed. Back in December there was a widespread assumption, bordering on certainty, that Tony Blair was heading for a third successive landslide victory. You could tell this by the way the two parties were conducting themselves in public. In the case of New Labour, the real battle was the contest to succeed Tony Blair on some indeterminate date after the general election, while the election itself was taken for granted. Among the Tories it was abject gloom. Michael Howard, who looked tired, was written off.

The universal predicament which confronts the western world at the start of the 21st century concerns the breakdown of boundaries. Philosophers blur the distinction between good and evil; society no longer protects family life; sociologists applaud the collapse of class barriers; globalisation challenges national borders; postmodernism asserts that truth and falsehood are the same. The act of adultery, with its savage betrayal of marriage, is the most accessible metaphor for our sorrowful modern predicament. At Westminster, as elsewhere, we suffer from transgression of boundaries. There are numerous examples of this in contemporary politics. One of the most curious is the collapse of the dividing line between politician and journalist.

Jack Straw, though by no means a distinguished foreign secretary, nevertheless possesses animal cunning. He is an acknowledged master of dissimulation, contrivance, machination, manoeuvre, evasion, guile, trickery, craft, diversion, disguise, distortion, persiflage, falsehood, deception, sophistry, stealth, artifice, sharp practice, underhand dealing, sleight of hand, subterfuge, prevarication and every other stratagem of concealment and deceit. Occasionally, however, the Foreign Secretary is capable of candour. This was the case with his parliamentary answer to Michael Ancram, the shadow foreign secretary, two weeks ago. Ancram wearily asked Jack Straw when the British government first knew of the botched coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea last March.

Peter Oborne reveals that the Tories have a secret weapon — the Voter Vault — which has identified the 900,000 swing voters the party needs to capture at the next election According to all objective criteria the Conservative party leadership ought to be very low in the water. The assassination of Iain Duncan Smith almost exactly 12 months ago has brought about numberless benefits: a new mood among fundraisers; the restoration of discipline and purpose in the parliamentary party; much higher morale on the ground. But it has had no effect on the polls. The Conservatives remain exactly where they were before, becalmed in the low thirties, seemingly heading for a third consecutive landslide defeat. But a mood of optimism endures.

Events are now moving very fast. By this time next week, the Bill to ban hunting will have received royal assent. The fight to halt this oppressive piece of legislation is moving away from Parliament, into the courts and, probably, on to the streets. The government is preparing with great care for the looming battle. According to trustworthy accounts from rural communities, the police have already started work setting up a network of informers. They are offering cash. I know of one huntsman who was visited by a police officer and offered ‘a formal arrangement so that you won’t need to cover any expenses’. There is plenty of evidence that approaches like these are being made all over the country.

Very few political decisions achieve nothing but good: one of them was the abolition of exchange controls exactly 25 years ago. This week the Adam Smith Institute rightly marked the anniversary with a dinner at the St Ermin’s hotel. Geoffrey Howe, the chancellor who masterminded the stroke, reflected on how monumental the judgment — so obvious in retrospect — appeared at the time. Lord Howe revealed that it was the only occasion in his career that he lost sleep on account of a policy decision, while Margaret Thatcher was all but overcome by last-minute nerves. Nigel Lawson, financial secretary in 1979, used the event to muse on how political judgments are reached. ‘It was a leap in the dark,’ he remembered.

I was brought up near Warminster in Wiltshire, and love this quiet, unassuming country town. Its proximity to the Salisbury plain has ensured it the role of local garrison, a position viewed with at best mixed emotions by the locals. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the Royal Irish Rangers, unable to serve back home, incessantly returned to Warminster. The Irish Rangers, since disbanded, were brave men and fine soldiers, but they instilled a reign of terror in the local pubs and nightspots that is remembered with a shudder to this day. Now Warminster plays host to one of the British army’s most famous regiments, the Black Watch, or to be precise their families, for most of the men have been serving in southern Iraq.