Whatever became of the August Silly Season?

In my last Saturday column three weeks ago, I highlighted the absence this year of what has hitherto been an almost annual feature of the summer political scene – the July Cabinet Reshuffle.

But as it turned out, that has not been the only thing missing from this strangest of summers. What on earth, I ask you, has happened to that other great British political tradition - the August Silly Season?

Gone, it seems, are those lazy, hazy days when all we political pundits had to write about at this time of the year was John Prescott finding a baby crab in the River Thames and naming it after Peter Mandelson.

No, this year's political close season has seen the worst rioting in English cities since 1981, the recall of Parliament, the fall of Tripoli to the anti-Gadaffi rebels and all the while the phone-hacking affair still simmering away in the background.

Prime Minister David Cameron must be wondering whether he is ever going to get a "normal" summer break again.

Last year, his August reveries were interrupted by the unexpectedly swift arrival of baby daughter Florence Rose Endellion during the family's holiday in, er, Endellion, Cornwall.

But if that was doubtless an unequivocally joyful experience for the Prime Minister, this year's riots represented an altogether grimmer intrusion into his family time.

For a day or two, indeed, it had looked as if the UK was sliding into anarchy, before Mr Cameron and the rest of the political establishment belatedly woke up to the danger and headed home to Westminster.

There was a brief hiccup for the Prime Minister when he came under fire for appearing to blame the police for not having responded quickly enough to the developing situation.

The evident anger felt by the boys in blue over this slur was understandable in the light of the ongoing cuts to police numbers which, though they may be intended to reduce police 'bureaucracy,' almost always seem to end up hitting frontline policing more.

This aside, though, the general consensus of opinion over the past fortnight has been that Mr Cameron has performed well in the aftermath of the troubles that briefly turned our city centres into no-go areas.

It has been an easier wicket for the Old Etonian premier than might ordinarily be supposed. It was, after all, he who bemoaned the 'broken society' when Labour under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown denied any such fracture existed.

Mr Blair probably would have done well to keep out of the debate, but predictably the temptation to pontificate proved irresistible for the increasingly ubiquitous former PM.

His argument that the riots were more the result of a disaffected underclass rather than a wider social breakdown or 'moral decline' begged more questions than it answered.

For starters, as Mr Blair himself was good enough to acknowledge, it contradicted his own assertions at the time of the James Bulger murder in 1993 that society was becoming "unworthy of the name."

Mr Blair now describes this intervention as "good politics but bad policy" – a telling admission that New Labour was always more about political positioning – or to give it another word, spin - than it was about policy substance.

As for the so-called underclass, they are hardly a new phenomenon, having been with us at least as long as the original English riots of Margaret Thatcher's day, and probably longer.

Alas Mr Blair had little time for them during his ten years as Prime Minister, preferring to focus his energies instead on more electorally important swing voters of Middle England.

Perhaps sensibly, the current Labour leader Ed Miliband has largely eschewed sociological analysis and spent most of the past three weeks agreeing with the government.

But this is always a difficult gig for an opposition leader, as Iain Duncan Smith found in 2001 when up against Mr Blair in the wake of 9/11.

Mr Cameron's wider difficulties with the economy, phone-hacking and above all the relationship with the Lib Dems have certainly not gone away, and will doubtless continue to loom large when politics resumes in earnest next month.

But as is almost always the case at times of national emergency, the overall political impact of the riots thus far has been to strengthen the government's position.

That's enough Blunkett

As I have said all along, David Blunkett's diaries were chiefly memorable for their entertainment value, and so entertaining did I find them that I devoted my Saturday Column and Podcast to the subject this weekend.

In years to come, there will be a great political counterfactual to be written along the lines of "What would have happened if David Blunkett hadn't met Kimberley Quinn?" I suspect the consensus of future historians will be that he would have given Gordon Brown a very close run for his money in the 2007 Labour leadership contest, and might even have become Prime Minister.

"David Blunkett coulda been a contender, as Brando might have put it. Instead, he’s in danger of becoming a becoming an embarrassment to the party he once helped rebuild.....In the space of a fortnight, he has put himself in the doghouse not just with Mr Blair, but also with Mr Brown."

And the doghouse is where, I expect, he will now remain. As Clement Attlee once said about Harold Laski - or was it Herbert Morrison? - "A period of silence from you would now be welcome."

Blunkett is cast into the outer darkness

There was a time when David Blunkett entertained serious hopes of becoming Labour leader and Prime Minister. More recently, after he realised that Gordon Brown is unbeatable, he appeared to make his peace with the Chancellor, and indicated that he might be interested in succeeding him in that post.

Today, however, those hopes are in ruins. As the controversry over his diaries continues to rage, the Brownite camp in the shape of Gordon's First Lieutenant, Right-Hand Man and Vicar-on-Earth Nick Brown has delivered a death blow to any lingering prospect of Blunkett resuming his frontline career.

"Newcastle" Brown does not normally do on-the-record quotes. He is the kind of politician - and all parties have them - who prefer to operate in the shadowy realms of thinly-veiled hints and off-the-record briefings, generating the kind of stories that end up being attributed to "close friends," and "key allies" rather than any named individual.

Yet here is the former Chief Whip telling today's Times: "Politics is a team game. Politicians on the same side have to stick together. I cannot understand what David Blunkett thinks he is doing except disqualifying himself from consideration as a serious politician."

This comment will need no deciphering among the ranks of Labour MPs who are used to Nick's ways. He could have chosen to employ his usual, less direct methods, and still got someone to write a story along the lines that "key allies" of Gordon Brown were warning Blunkett as to his future behaviour - but he didn't.

It can only mean that Gordon is sending a clear an unambiguous message to the former Home Secretary. "You're out."

Did I do Stephen Byers a disservice?

David Blunkett's tape-recorded diaries The Blunkett Tapes are published today having been serialised in the Grauniad last week. I have already made clear my view that the content should be viewed primarily as entertainment rather than enlightenment, in particular the assertion that Tony Blair was ready to sack Gordon Brown unless he backed the Iraq War in 2003.

One little gem did catch my eye though in Friday's final instalment. Had I not been in a very important meeting for most of that day, and had my home dial-up connection not been buggered for most of the weekend, I would have blogged on it before now.

Anyway....I refer to a passage in which Mr Blunkett gives his take on one of the infamous episodes in the entire history of the Blair administration, the email sent by Stephen Byers' special adviser Jo Moore on the afternoon of 9/11 stating that it was now "a very good day to get out anything we want to bury."

Blunkett's account casts a completely new light on the episode, and therefore merits reproduction in full:

October 2001

[Leak of email sent by Jo Moore, special adviser to Stephen Byers, to Department of Transport press office on September 11 saying it would be a "very good day" to "bury" bad news]

The world has gone crackers, and the cause célèbre of the week has been the débâcle over Jo Moore, which is going on and on. Steve was intending to sack Jo Moore, but by early afternoon it had all changed and apparently it was because, quite rightly, Tony had perceived that this was a try-on by the civil service. It was felt that they were the ones who had received the email and leaked it, and no matter how appalling the email, the declaration of war by the civil service and their ability to leak emails and thereby bring down special advisers had to be countered. Unfortunately life is not as simple as that. Tony's interpretation of the situation is right, but Steve's initial decision to sack Jo Moore for the content of the email was also right because this story has run and run and run.

In dictating this I had no idea just how catastrophic it was going to be for Steve Byers. I think those advising really did mean well, and it was a difficult situation to call. There is no doubt that Jo Moore paid the price, but what price.

Now this, to my knowledge, is the first time anyone has claimed that the decision not to sack Moore after her initial, appalling misdemeanour was not Byers's, but Blair's.

I was of course working in the Lobby at the time as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal, and since Byers is a Tyneside MP, it is fair to say I took a keen interest in the story. It was common knowledge within the Lobby that Alastair Campbell, then at the very height of his powers, wanted Moore out, and the supposition was that it was Byers - not Blair - who was resisting this.

I have myself written on a number of occasions in my Journal column and elsewhere that not sacking Moore was the mistake that wrecked Byers' career. Yet it now turns out that it might not have been his decision at all.

It would be too much to expect a loyal Blairite such as Byers to now confirm the truth of Blunkett's account at the cost of dropping the Prime Minister in it. But once Mr Blair has left office, it will be interesting to see if Byers chooses to set the record straight.

Blunkett is re-writing history

In the latest instalment of his diaries currently being serialised in the Guardian, David Blunkett claims that Gordon Brown only backed the Iraq War at the last minute after concluding that Tony Blair would sack him if he didn't. As well as making the paper's front-page splash this morning, this story was also being talked-up by a wide-eyed Nick Robinson on last night's 10 O'Clock News.

I am genuinely surprised at both the Guardian and the Beeb for giving this such credence. If they had cast their minds back to 2003 for a few seconds, they would surely have realised that any notion of the Prime Minister being able to sack the Chancellor at that juncture is palpably absurd.

The Iraq War was, and is, a bitterly divisive issue for the Labour Party. Tony Blair was extremely fortunate that only two Cabinet ministers, Robin Cook and Clare Short, resigned over it, and furthermore that they did so in such a way that the parliamentary opposition to the conflict was fragmented rather than brought together.

The idea that, in this highly unstable political situation in which his premiership hung by a knife-edge, Tony Blair could have sacked Gordon Brown without triggering a successful coup against his leadership is, as Charlie Whelan would say, bollocks.

Then again, it does throw up what would surely be an interesting chapter in a book of political counterfactuals, were Iain Dale and Duncan Brack ever tempted to repeat that exercise.

Had Blair been daft enough to make Brown a martyr to the anti-war cause in, say, March 2003 after the first phase of the conflict ended, Brown would undoubtedly have become Prime Minister by the summer of that year after the unravelling of the Government's case for the war and the suicide of Dr David Kelly.

Mr Brown, untainted by the "trust" issue that attached itself to Mr Blair post-Kelly, would then have led Labour to a third successive 100-plus landslide, reducing the Tories to a parliamentary rump and producing in them such a collective nervous breakdown that their prospects of ever regaining power became negligible.

In other words, if we really were living in David Blunkett's parallel universe, the cause of the left in British politics might today be looking a damned site healthier.