Where does the buck stop?

Is there a wider lesson to be learned from the debacle over whether the sailors captured by Iran should have been allowed to sell their stories? Who is really to blame for creating the kind of political culture in which this was initially seen as a good idea? This was the subject of my weekend column in the Journal and Derby Evening Telegraph today, and here it is in full.

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The practice once quaintly known as "chequebook journalism" has nowadays become so commonplace that an entire cottage industry has grown up around it - one that goes by the name of Max Clifford Associates.

But twenty or so years ago, when the phrase was first coined, it was clearly understood to be a perjorative term for what was considered the dubious practice of buying newspaper stories for cash.

Back then, few imagined that a group of serving members of the Royal Navy who had just been engaged in a major international incident would one day be given official approval to sell their stories for six-figure sums.

But that was precisely what happened last weekend before the Government, realising it had a public relations disaster on its hands, executed a swift u-turn.

The Navy's initial response to the outcry appeared to be to try to maintain that the decision had been made internally, without wider MoD or ministerial involvement.

But it was obvious from the start that such a decision would have to have been taken, or at the very least approved, at a political level - or that if it wasn't, it should have been.

Belatedly, Defence Secretary Des Browne admitted he had indeed known of the decision, and insisted that the buck stopped with him.

At the same time, however, he maintained that although he had known of it and not put a stop to it, he had not approved the decision as such - a rather hair-splitting distinction even by New Labour standards.

Mr Browne has been hitherto one of the Government's lesser-known figures, a somewhat faceless apparatchik whose rise through the ministerial ranks has been as stealthy as it has been steady.

His elevation to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury after the 2005 election was the subject of a minor Whitehall controversy.

The post had apparently been earmarked by Tony Blair for the former Home Office minister John Denham, who resigned over the Iraq War with Robin Cook in 2003.

But Gordon Brown, who has always insisted on the right to appoint his own deputies, had already promised the job to his pal Des, and not for the first time, Mr Blair fought shy of a confrontation with his Chancellor.

In the event, he proved just the sort of middle-ranking minister Mr Blair likes - competent, low-key, and seemingly adept in keeping himself out of trouble.

He was duly rewarded with what seemed to some to be a startling promotion to Defence Secretary last May when Charles Clarke was sacked and the much-travelled John Reid moved to take up his current berth at the Home Office.

Again, Mr Browne proved the doubters wrong, and his quiet effectiveness in a difficult role had him spoken of a few weeks back as a possible Chancellor in a Gordon Brown government.

But as if to prove the old truism that everyone eventually rises to the level of their own incompetence, Mr Browne came back down to earth last week with a bump - and now his very survival as a minister is in question.

Much will now depend on his statement to the House of Commons on Monday, but the damage has already been done by Mr Browne's confused accounts of the affair.

His initial defence was that he was "not content" with the decision, but that he believed he had no choice under the rules but to acquiesce in it.

But given that any remotely competent lobby hack would know that all interviews with service personnel have to be cleared by the MoD press office, this is scarcely convincing.

And Mr Browne's case has not been helped by yesterday's revelation that the Press Complaints Commission had offered to help the MoD deal with the problem, but been rebuffed.

Aside from the Defence Secretary's plight, the whole episode of the 15 sailors' detention and subsequent release has not been a happy one for the Government.

Even prior to their release, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett had faced criticism for her apparently rather weak response, branding Iran's actions as merely "unacceptable" as opposed to the more trenchant language some might have favoured.

The release itself was a public relations triumph for Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, whose mixture of demagogic charm and political extremism makes him quite possibly the most dangerous man on the planet.

In the wider context of the diplomatic effort to prevent the Iranian president acquiring nuclear weapons, the affair seems to have had no impact at all.

In the final analysis, is this what Harold Macmillan might have called a little local difficulty, or is there a wider political lesson in it all?

Well, the obvious conclusion is that when things start to go wrong for a government, as they did for Mr Blair's long ago, you eventually reach the point where absolutely nothing goes right.

The idea, floated in the immediate aftermath that the release, that it would provide Mr Blair and Labour with a boost in the run-up to the local election campaign has proved risible.

Scotland and the SNP threat seems to have become the focus of the Government's worries on that score, and it is ironic that Mr Blair, who once dismissed the Scottish media as a bunch of unreconstructed self-abusers, is having to spend the dying days of his premiership there.

If there is a deeper lesson, though, it is surely to do with the media culture that New Labour has by turns encouraged and fed-off during its decade in power.

Only an administration which hijacked the death of a Princess to make itself look good and which thought 9/11 was a good day to bury bad news would think that allowing Navy personnel to sell their stories was a good idea.

It is all very well Mr Blair saying with the benefit of hindsight that it wasn't such a great idea after all, but in a political culture which views the media as an extension of Whitehall, it is scarcely surprising that such things happen.

It was Mr Blair and his sidekicks who created that culture. And if the buck stops anywhere, it is there.

What will be Blair's legacy?

What will Tony Blair most be remembered for? Leading Labour to three election victories or Iraq? The minimum wage or cash for honours? Have your say in my current poll which can be accessed HERE or via the sidebar.

Will a Miliband bid bring Johnson in?

The man himself continues to deny it, but speculation about a David Miliband challenge to Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership continues unabated. Political betting guru Mike Smithson has today become the latest pundit to predict a Miliband candidacy, following last weekend's Sunday Telegraph tale that John Reid would be giving the Environment Secretary his backing.

But here's a question no-one seems to have asked as yet: what impact will a Miliband challenge have on other wannabe leaders who have thus far ruled themselves out of challenging Brown - ostensibly on the basis that he is the best candidate, but secretly because they don't think they can beat him?

Look at it this way. So long as Brown remains the only serious candidate, and overwhelmingly the most likely winner, there really is no great incentive for someone like Alan Johnson or Hilary Benn to challenge him. Far better to settle for the deputy leadership and (hopefully) a big job in the Brown Government.

But the moment that situation changes, and Brown faces a serious challenge which could theoretically result in him being defeated, then by my reckoning, all bets are off, and all earlier denials of interest so much hot air.

Such a scenario would present a particularly acute dilemma for the fifty-somethings Johnson, Benn and Peter Hain were the 40-year-old Miliband to be that challenger. The current consensus is that if Miliband does stand, he will at the very least establish himself as the heir-apparent, and could even win.

But that, of course, is the last thing Alan Johnson wants. He doesn't want the Labour leadership to "skip a generation" - at least not just yet. He wants to be deputy so that he can slip effortlessly into Gordon's shoes if the next election goes belly-up. The same may apply, to a slightly lesser extent, to Benn and Hain.

Hence my hunch is that if Miliband does stand against Gordon - and I'm still by no means convinced he will - he won't be the only one.

The "ultras" - Reid, Charles Clarke, even Blair himself - may all line up behind him, but he won't get a clear run. And at 40, with other, vastly more experienced people for the Labour Party to choose from, why on earth should he?

* Historical footnote. Similar calculations about whether a challenge to an established frontrunner could create a domino effect causing others to throw their hats into the ring also operated last time round, in the 1994 leadership contest.

One of the principal though lesser-known reasons Brown didn't stand on that occasion was that had he done so, it would have brought his old rival Robin Cook into the race.

With the support of the left and the likely second preference votes of Margaret Beckett and John Prescott, Cook would in all likelihood have come second, ahead of Brown, establishing himself as the de facto No 2 in the Labour pecking order.

People who knew Brown and Cook of old in their Edinburgh days have told me this was something Brown would have wanted even less than to see Blair leading the party.

Another one bites the dust...

The left-of-centre blogosphere will be a poorer place for the loss of The Daily. At its height, it was in my view one of the top two or three left-leaning blogs in the UK, and a regular source of interesting material on the Labour Deputy Leadership contest in particular.

Now it is no more, it would be nice to know who was actually behind it, as they were clearly Westminster insiders.

Blair's place in history

Hats off to the Observer for its magnificent retrospective on the Blair Years on Sunday, the centrepiece of which was a magisterial essay from the essential chronicler of those years, Andrew Rawnsley.

Predictably for one who has always been seen as something of a New Labour boulevardier, Rawnsley's ultimate conclusion on the Blair premiership is a positive one.

"Some Prime Ministers merely preside over their time. Better Prime Ministers change their time. When Tony Blair's portrait goes up on the staircase wall at Number 10, he will leave office with a good claim to belong to that select company of Prime Ministers who change the future," he says.

To its credit, however, the Ob makes room for an alternative perspective from historian Dominic Sandbrook, who writes: "Truly great Prime Ministers challenge the status quo. They do not simply accept it. Blair seems destined to be remembered therefore as a consummately skilled political operator with brilliant tactical instincts but no radical or compelling long-term vision."

It probably won't surprise many people to know that I'm with Sandbrook on this. Any leftward shift in the political centre of gravity under Blair has been marginal when compared with the huge rightward shift under Thatcher which, by and large, her successor-but-one has accepted.

For me, he will go down in history as someone who had a historic opportunity to rebuild a social democratic political consensus in the UK, but who wasted his first term worrying about getting re-elected, his second on the disaster of Iraq, and his third on his preoccupation with his own legacy.

As Sandbrook writes: "Blair could have used his massive majorities to ram through radical changes in the health service, reorganise the railways, reconstitute the House of Lords, overhaul the pensions system, reform the electoral system, push for greater integration in the EU, even write a new constitution.

"If he had managed two or three - perfectly plausible in 10 years as Attlee could have told him, his domestic legacy would be uncontestable. But he never did."

May 3 and beyond

Today's column in the Newcastle Journal and Derby Evening Telegraph aims to catch-up on what happened while I was away and look ahead to the local election campaign and its likely aftermath. Here it is in full. It is also now available as a Podcast.

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The Tories say they have a "mountain to climb" in the North of England. Labour are bracing themselves for heavy losses more or less everywhere. The Lib Dems bravely claim there are no "no-go areas" for their party. Sound familiar, anyone?

Excuse me if I experience a slight feeling of déjà vu when it comes to this year's local election battle.

The two main parties appear to be playing down expectations, doubtless in the hope that things will turn out better than anticipated. The third is playing them up, in the hope that the voters will take them seriously.

But as ever, the trick with this sort of pre-election positioning is to try to separate the spin from the reality.

What seems beyond dispute is that the Government is in for a hammering as voters vent their frustration at the sense of drift that has characterised Labour for the past year.

Last September, following the failed coup attempt against Tony Blair, I wrote that if the Prime Minister was still in place by time of these elections, the party would pay the price.

As it has turned out, it appears to be a price the party is prepared to pay in order to allow its most successful leader ever a dignified exit at a time more or less of his own choosing.

But whether that is how it will be seen by the hundreds of Labour councillors, Scottish MSPs or Welsh AMs set to lose their seats on May 3 is another question entirely.

The local councils are one thing. Labour would doubtless like to win back cities like Newcastle, but it won't do any lasting damage to the party's national powerbase if it doesn't.

Local government has, in any case, nothing like the power it had when I first started covering local elections two decades ago.

The Scottish and Welsh bodies are a slightly different matter, though. They do have significant devolved powers, as Welsh Assembly leader Rhodri Morgan's recent decision to scrap prescription charges showed.

Furthermore, because most seats in the devolved bodies are coterminous with Westminster constituencies, there is much more of an interplay between Labour's performance in Scotland and Wales and its electoral prospects UK-wide.

I must confess to being surprised that Scottish and Welsh Labour MPs have been prepared to put up with a situation which is likely to see their party's powerbase in those areas significantly eroded.

If, for instance, a Labour parliamentary constituency ends up with a Lib Dem MSP, it creates a situation in which Labour's hold on the Westminster seat can be steadily undermined.

It was for this reason that I expected Scottish and Welsh MPs to be in the vanguard of a renewed attempt to force Blair out well before we got into the local election campaign.

But they bottled it, and in my view, that is something they will fairly shortly come to regret.

So, I believe, will Gordon Brown. The prevailing consensus throughout the past few months has been that the Chancellor was happy to let Mr Blair "take the hit" for the expected May 3 carnage.

If that is the case, I think that he was taking an extremely defeatist view about his ability to restore Labour's fortunes if and when he finally takes over.

If Mr Brown truly believes that he is the man to renew Labour in government, he should instead have taken the view that the sooner he took over, the better for the party's prospects.

The more electoral damage that is done to Labour under Mr Blair, the more poisoned the chalice that Mr Brown will eventually inherit.

Assuming, that is, that he does inherit. The fortnight since this column last appeared has seen a further ratcheting up of the pressure on South Shields MP and Environment Secretary David Miliband to throw his own hat into the ring.

It no longer seems possible to take at face value Mr Miliband's denials of last autumn, when he declared that he was "neither a runner nor a rider for any of the posts that are being speculated about".

His failure to kill the current wave of speculation has led to suspicions in the Brown camp that he is, at the very least, still pondering a bid.

One Brown ally said last weekend: "Miliband knows exactly what he is doing. He could quite easily say specifically, `I won't stand against Gordon' or that he is far less experienced than Gordon - something he couldn't go back on. But he doesn't."

Mr Brown, meanwhile, is in an increasingly invidious position. Like the long-distance-runner who has spent too long anxiously looking over his shoulder, his position seems to weaken with each week that goes by.

Notwithstanding its historic import, his decision to announce a 20p standard rate of tax in the Budget appears to have won him few friends and the row over the 1997 pension fund grab has been deeply damaging.

Labour has a perfectly respectable story to tell on this, which is that an anomaly in the tax system needed to be removed in order to release funds to help the many, not the few.

Instead Brown's strategy seemed to be firstly to try to conceal the evidence that he ignored civil service advice, and then when that failed, spin a cock-and-bull story about how the CBI encouraged him to do it.

It is hard - very hard - to escape the conclusion that this is exactly what Mr Blair intended when he decided to "play it long" and drag out his departure until this summer.

Messrs Brown and Blair were united on the campaign trail for one last time last week as Labour launched its local election push - but it is hard to see who they were trying to convince.

The old double act has served Labour well over a decade or more, but it has long since run its course.

And the real story now is not what happens in the days and weeks leading up to May 3, but what happens in the days and weeks immediately afterwards.