Peter Oborne

The longer they stay in power, the more prime ministers lose their political touch. This seems to be an unbreakable rule, and Tony Blair is emphatically not an exception. For most prime ministers, however, there is an important compensation. The longer they stay in Downing Street, the more accomplished they become at the art of government. They steadily get to understand the secret springs and mechanisms of power. The funny thing is that Tony Blair has failed to mature in this way. Not only is he losing his political touch, but he is also no more competent today than he was when he entered Downing Street nearly seven years ago. There is a growing body of evidence to support this rather damning assertion.

After the 2001 general election massacre, a consensus swiftly established itself in the Conservative party. William Hague had fought on the wrong issues. Instead of Europe and asylum, his chosen battlegrounds, he should have championed health and education. Hague’s mistake, so conventional wisdom held, doomed the Conservatives to be the rancid voice of the malcontents, the losers, the racists: the detritus of 21st-century Britain. This persuasive analysis, associated above all with the so-called ‘modernisers’, swiftly took hold in Tory high command after Hague’s abrupt departure. It held sway under Iain Duncan Smith, and even more so under Michael Howard.

Spring has come late this year, punctuated by news of three horrible, doom-laden terrorist atrocities: the bombing of Shia worshippers in Iraq and Pakistan, the slaughter in Madrid, and the Israeli assassination of the Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. In Westminster there is an air of grim expectation. People’s habits are starting to change. I know one media couple who no longer travel together by Tube, a precaution in case they leave their children orphaned. A well-known political correspondent has taken to driving to work, rather than going by train. Bomb scares now routinely delay commuter traffic into town. The looming Easter recess will see the erection of a bullet-proof glass barrier between the Strangers’ Gallery and the Chamber.

The most significant purely domestic event in what has turned into a terrible week on the international stage was a speech by Jack McConnell to Labour’s Scottish conference in an arctic Inverness. McConnell looked ahead to next year’s general election, as all politicians are beginning to do, and emerged with a subversive proposition: Labour should fight on the economy. There is a litany of statistics that will enable Labour to go into the general election with a winning hand on this front: inflation and unemployment at their lowest since the 1960s, seven years’ uninterrupted growth, spending on health and education powering ahead, etc.

The invasion of Iraq and everything that followed caused grave difficulties for the government. But at least it created a sense of purpose and perpetuated the illusion that Tony Blair is a strong Prime Minister. The primacy of domestic issues over the last few weeks has reminded us how vacant New Labour really is. Politics has suddenly lurched back three or four years to the era of government by gimmick, the cringe-making early Blair period when Downing Street was dominated by a frenzied desire to create newspaper headlines. Contemplate last week. The Prime Minister launched his plan for random drug-testing in schools on Sunday. By Monday his scheme was in trouble and by Tuesday it was halfway to collapse. Over at the Treasury Gordon Brown was not to be outdone.

This has been by far the dullest week in British politics since well before the 2001 general election. Yet it would be wrong to say that nothing is going on; far from it. A meddling government has resolved, once again, to tear up the examination system. There is a Cabinet rift over the treatment of migrant workers from Eastern Europe. The emergence of a prospective President Kerry in the United States has left Tony Blair looking too close to President Bush for comfort. Unemployment sank to a 28-year low — though scarcely reported, it was the most significant political event of the week. Nevertheless, it remains the case that there have been no crises, wars or dramas of any kind.

This year’s dominant theme has been the domestic legacy of the war against Iraq. It has hung over British politics like a cloud of mustard gas, foul-smelling and ubiquitous. This week the cloud at last lifted, and it became possible to survey with a new clarity the ravaged landscape. Lt Col Blair, the commanding officer, now walks with a pronounced limp, and shows signs of shock. But the important thing is that he is still in place, barking orders and to some extent in command. Major Hoon is at his post. The regimental adjutant, Captain Campbell, had to be taken away by the military police and silenced after becoming hysterical. The devastation is widespread. Dyke, Davies and Gilligan are missing. Major Howard on the opposition side has been injured.

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.

By the time Parliament rises for the Christmas recess, the Prime Minister will have endured 18 consecutive days without a day off. This stretch embraces two uncomfortable working weekends, the first of them to the fly-blown Nigerian capital of Abuja for the Commonwealth conference, an event made more fractious than usual by the Zimbabwe squabble. The Prime Minister left Abuja before the conference finished in order to return to a family funeral in Scotland. The hazards of this complicated journey included a 3.15-am arrival at Glasgow airport. Then it was back to London and the Downing Street reception for the all-conquering England rugby XV.

The intelligent case for voting for Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001 was simple and very compelling. Only New Labour could bring about deep-seated reform of British public services. The argument went as follows: the Tories would never be trusted to tamper with the NHS or the social security system. Their motives were suspect. The voters were easily convinced that their real agenda was privatisation. Just as Richard Nixon, a Republican president, was the only political leader who could restore relations with communist China, so Labour's Tony Blair was the only man who could take on the public-sector workers.

Six years into the Thatcher government, and there was no question about who the Prime Minister was, what she stood for and where she was going. There was already a substantial body of achievement. Not so Tony Blair. Halfway through his second term he remains a rudderless and curiously negligible figure. If he vanished one morning in a puff of smoke, an outcome that can by no means be ruled out, he would leave very little behind. This week’s warning from Jack Straw that Britain is ready to veto the new European constitution admirably demonstrates the fleeting, insubstantial quality of so many of the Prime Minister’s political enthusiasms. The Foreign Secretary’s defiant briefing contradicts everything Tony Blair has said.

Normally the leaves are still on the trees, full of their autumn glory in russet and brown, when Parliament rises ahead of the Queen’s Speech. Not this year. For reasons no one can quite explain, this session has stretched on towards winter. It has been marred by squabbling and drift. Wednesday night’s venomous rebellion over foundation hospitals was in keeping with the mood of the rest of the year, easily Tony Blair’s worst as Labour leader. He has started to create the impression that he does not know who he is or what he is doing in Downing Street. Even quite loyal ministers readily admit that the government has lost its way. Tony Blair’s behaviour has taken on a strange, random turn.

George Bush needs to be pictured with the Queen to impress voters in the forthcoming presidential election, but, says Peter Oborne, next week’s state visit by the Commander-in-Chief is causing chaos It is obvious why Tony Blair agreed that next week’s visit to Britain by George Bush was a good idea. It was suggested in the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan. The Blair–Bush relationship was at its strongest, and the transatlantic alliance at its most formidable: the Iraq war yet to come. Over the past few weeks, Downing Street, the White House and Buckingham Palace have been urgently coming to terms with an invitation issued rather too casually when the world was a different place. It is causing chaos.

It has been a week of stagnation and drift in Westminster. MPs have almost nothing to do in the Commons. On Monday night party managers put Conservative MPs on a one-line whip; in other words told them that they might as well go home, a decision that was only partly inspired by the forlorn hope that it would stop them plotting. This state of affairs looks set to carry on right up to the Queen’s Speech, which is not due till late November. Only in the House of Lords, where peers on Tuesday night voted down the Hunting Bill in a sudden squall of energy, is there any purpose or vitality. It is hard to know whose plight is the more wretched: the Tories with their inability to oppose, or New Labour with its incapacity to govern. Both parties are gripped by a crisis of identity.

Three events counted at Westminster this week. The first, and by far the most important, was the dramatic testimony given on Monday to Lord Hutton by Kevin Tebbit, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence. Tebbit confirmed that Tony Blair chaired the crucial meeting at which the ‘naming strategy’, designed to bring the identity of Dr Kelly into the public domain, was agreed. The importance of Tebbit’s revelation could not be greater. If Tebbit’s evidence is to be accepted, then Tony Blair’s emphatic assertion that ‘I did not authorise the leaking of the name of Dr Kelly’ was false.