Were you there?

Well, I was, but with the hacks on the other side of the street rather than the cheering crowds pictured here.


It was possibly the craziest day of my entire working life. I had gone up to Newcastle the day before to cover the election for my paper, The Journal, and worked through the night with colleagues to produce our election special edition. At 6am I got on the London train, arriving back in my office in the Press Gallery at 9.30am. Then it was off to Downing Street to hear John Major's graceful exit. At that stage I reckoned I would be at work at least another 8-9 hours, so I envied him being able to go off and watch cricket on such a beautiful day.

Eventually the new Prime Minister arrived in triumph, having kissed hands at the Palace minutes earlier. "I should tell you that earlier this morning, I was invited by Her Majesty the Queen to form a government," he informed us in a slightly self-deprecating way, before going on to make his much-parodied statement about governing as old Tories New Labour. He also paid a generous tribute to Major, triggering a minor outbreak of booing among the more graceless (and less choreographed) elements of the cheering crowd.

By mid-afternoon, the details of the first Cabinet appointments were emerging and by 5am we were back at No 10 for the new government's first Lobby briefing. Alastair Campbell strode in to the basement room to general cheering from the hacks, who still, at that stage, regarded him as one of them. Asked how the new Prime Minister felt, he replied: "He realises that he has been given a remarkable opportunity to unite the country." It was a phrase that has always stuck in my mind.

I finally arrived back at my flat in Islington that night at 8pm, having had no sleep for 36 hours except for a few snatched moments on the train. It had been hugely satisfying, if rather exhausting, to have watched history unfolding at such close quarters, though not an experience I necessarily wanted to repeat. But of course, four years later, in June 2001, I did!

An empty anniversary

Actually, the real anniversary is tomorrow. Blair did not become Prime Minister until May 2, 1997, the day on which he was invited by the Queen to form a government, but predictably, most newspapers are treating today as marking Blair's 10 years.

I'll give my considered thoughts on what his premiership will be remembered for after he announces his resignation next week, but in the meantime, what significance should we attach to the fact that Blair has now emulated Walpole, North, Pitt, Liverpool and Thatcher by serving a continuous decade in power?

Well, the answer to that is not a lot, in my view. As that list demonstrates, it's a milestone that neither necessarily reflects greatness, nor necessarily confers it.

The truth is that Blair should not have remained Prime Minister this long, either for the good of the country, the good of the Labour Party, or for the good of his own historical reputation. That he has finally chalked up ten years is more a tribute to his tenacity and to the paucity of alternatives than to any real and lasting sense of political achievement.

As I have written before, Blair should in all conscience have gone in 2003, after the David Kelly scandal. The fact that no-one in the government was prepared to take the rap for this tragic episode has always seemed to me an appalling dereliction of responsibility.

Whether or not it was Alastair Campbell himself, it is quite clear that someone in the government spin machine took the decision to release Dr Kelly's name, and under the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, it was Mr Blair who should have been ultimately held accountable.

As the late Hugo Young wrote at the time, the suicide of Dr Kelly was no random act of chance. It was an illustration of "the dynamic that is unleashed when the Prime Minister's sainted reputation becomes the core value his country has to defend."

Blair could even have made it a resignation on a point of honour, like Lord Carrington's over the Falklands invasion in 1982. He could have said "I was not responsible for this, and I deplore the chain of events that led to it, but the buck stops with me."

Of course, Blair survived, but nothing was ever quite the same again. Early in 2004, he seems to have experienced a momentary realisation that the catastrophic loss of trust that had occurred as a result of the war and its aftermath could not be regained under his leadership.

He could have gone then, handed over to Gordon Brown while the latter's reputation was still sky-high, ensuring Labour another three-figure majority in 2005 over Michael Howard's right-wing Tory rabble.

Instead, Blair hugely outstayed his welcome, and the results of that will be plain for all to see in Thursday night's local elections when Labour's support slumps to near the levels the party enjoyed when he first entered Parliament at the "suicide note" election of 1983.

Less than a year ago, a leaked Downing Street memo laughably suggested that Blair should "go with the crowds wanting more." He's actually going when the crowds can't wait to see the back of him. And he has only himself to blame.

An unanswerable case

Firstly, many congratulations to Rachel North on her marriage on Saturday.

With the conclusion of the trial into the foiled terror plot, the story can now be told about what Rachel was on about in this post as referenced on this blog HERE.

In the light of what we now know - that the security services knew that two of the London bombers were part of that terror network and failed to stop them - I find it inconceivable that the Government can continue in its boneheaded refusal of a full public inquiry into 7/7.

Maybe they are just waiting for Gordon to announce it.

Why I hope Iain Dale is wrong

Before anyone accuses me of taking sides in the increasingly tedious "blog wars," let me make clear that what follows is not a personal attack on Iain Dale. But I read his piece about the importance of women voters in today's Daily Telegraph with an increasing sense of despair.

Dale may very well be right in his central thesis that women will decide the result of the next general election because David Cameron is more fanciable than Gordon Brown. I just hope to God he's 100pc wrong.

He writes: "Few non-political women judge a male politician purely by what he says. They judge him on the way he looks, sounds and appears on television. Put crudely, they ask themselves consciously, or unconsciously, if he has got the "fanciability" factor. In an unguarded moment, my sister Sheena told me that she and her friends sometimes play a game called "If you had to, would you?" Simon Cowell or Dale Winton was one unfortunate choice they recently gave themselves.

"This week, I asked her to put another option to her friends - Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or David Cameron. Out of an admittedly small sample of 40 Essex girls, 33 opted to lie back and think of England with David Cameron, three with Tony Blair and a resounding zero for Gordon Brown."

Well, all I can say about this is if, as Dale seems to suggest, we now live in a political culture where women cast their votes on the basis of whether they would like to sleep with the party leader, then I'm tempted to think that maybe it's about time I emigrated.

But on reflection, I think I will hang around at least until the next general election to see whether Dale is right, or whether in fact Gordon Brown can yet confound those cynics who assume that modern politics is about the triumph of style over substance.

Who should get Gordon's job?

Now that the Premiership seems in the bag for Manchester United Gordon, expect the great guessing game over the shape of his Cabinet to start up again. I'll be posting my thoughts here soon, but meanwhile, here's a new Poll to enable you to cast your votes for the next Chancellor.

I reckon there are no more than six possible candidates in the running and I would be amazed if Brown picks anyone from outside that half-dozen. They are long-time Treasury aide Ed Balls, Defence Secretary Des Browne, Trade and Industry Secretary Alistair Darling, Environment Secretary David Miliband, Commons leader Jack Straw and the current Treasury No 2, Stephen Timms.

All this must end, Gordon

There is a commonly held view in politics that, for all Tony Blair's frantic search for a legacy, he will, in the end, only be remembered for the Iraq War. The results of my current poll suggest that is indeed how around 29pc of people will remember him.

But that figure was narrowly trumped by the 30pc who believe that Mr Blair's biggest legacy will not be the war, but the loss of trust in government engendered by his addiction to spin.

Of course, there is a fairly strong interrelationship between the two. I have always believed that what the public objected to most was not the war itself, but the way we were spun into it by Alastair Campbell and Co on the basis of dodgy dossiers and false prospecti.

But that only goes to demonstrate my main point - that the big, big problem with the Blair government - the one that has above all been responsible for its descent into public obloquy - has been spin.

There is no point rehashing it all again here. Blair will be gone in a few weeks, thank God, and to coin a phrase, now is the time to look forward, not back.

There now seems little doubt that Gordon Brown has the Prime Minsistership in the bag - but is he above the use of mendacious and misleading spin? For all that I admire the man, I'm afraid the answer to that is no.

Seven years ago, I covered a story for the Newcastle Journal in which Mr Brown attempted to spin away the existence of the North-South jobs divide.

Pointing to the fact that there were 75,000 people in the region claiming Jobseeker's Allowance and 61,000 Jobcentre vacancies, he argued that there were almost enough jobs to go round.

What the Chancellor was conveniently ignoring was the fact that his own Government had stopped using the JSA claimant count as the official measure of unemployment in 1998, and that the new ILO measure showed there were 103,000 people without jobs in the region.

Only The Journal and one other newspaper spotted this statistical sleight-of-hand, allowing Mr Brown's claim to go unchallenged in most of the national media.

Okay, so it's seven years ago now - fairly ancient history in political terms. So old in fact that no online version of the story now exists.

But if Mr Brown has become a changed character since then, it was not greatly in evidence during last month's Budget, when he foolishly attempted to present the 2p income tax reduction as a tax cut, which it wasn't, as opposed to a simplification of the tax system, which it undoubtedly is.

My view, and I suspect that of the millions of ordinary voters who have become disillusioned with New Labour over the past decade, is that all this must now end.

Whatever fresh policy directions Mr Brown intends to lead Labour in when he finally takes over, the biggest task facing the new premier is to restore public trust in government.

I don't believe that Gordon Brown will credibly be able to do that unless, like a recovering alcoholic, he can first acknowledge his own past dependence on spin and move on.

Can he do it? It may seem an extravagant claim, but I believe that on the answer to that question may well depend the result of the next general election.

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