Blair government fails to take advantage of unique situation

In London these days it is easy to forget what government now is. The Blair government is a species none of us has experienced, a laboratory experiment in something newer than New Labour.

It is government with nothing to fear from anyone. It faces neither division within nor opposition without. It is government that can carry into law whatever ministers agree they want to do. It exists beyond the norms of argument that have obtained for 50 years. Yet these norms are insisted on as if nothing has changed since Churchill.

The reason why the error is easily made is that both governors and governed - but especially the governors - prefer it to reality. It's in their blood-stream. Hysteria continues as if Mr Blair's very life depended on the outcome. Scenarios of crisis and disaster unfold, amid furrowed brows and much sucking-in of pundits' breath.

The premise is that the cabinet could soon be done for, as it often has been in the past. It is hard to kick the analytical habit of a lifetime. The premise, however, is deeply false. Mr Blair's survival is not an accurate factor in the speculative equation. Under Mrs Thatcher, even with her huge majorities, the public was an ever-present danger. Under Mr Major, with his small one, the Commons was always going to be his nemesis. Neither threat exists for Mr Blair, even on the far horizon.

Government, therefore, is not what it always used to be, a series of battles against multiple oppositions, but something both more interesting and less exciting: a prolonged grappling by ministers, on behalf of the country, with difficult problems to which nobody else is likely, for many years, to be required to find the answer.

The proof of this is the survival of Robin Cook. In old-style governments, existing on sufferance, Mr Cook would be dead. He tests to destruction the case of those of us who perform the valiant task of insisting that sinners can make first-class politicians. Never has a character been more thoroughly demolished.

It may not be normal to give any divorce party half the credence accorded to Margaret Cook's demeaning, hypocritical, repellent, money-grubbing revelations, but Mr Cook has enough enemies who are delighted to seize on them. He has been hideously displayed by the second-order haters in the press. Yet he will survive, and may even be strengthened in the end.

Partly, this is because his professional colleagues - the Europeans, the Americans - know an intellect when they see one, and have nothing but praise for his diplomatic energy: he may not be conventionally respectful, but neither Mrs Albright nor Mr Fischer seem much bothered by that.

Partly, also, it is Mr Cook's good fortune to find mincingly reproaching him Michael Howard, a detested Home Secretary from whom he need take no lessons in competence, principle or the loyal handling of departmental officials.

But the real basis of Mr Cook's continuance is that the government is not vulnerable. Though the old premise of imminent disintegration infuses the coverage, it is quite unreal. Government is no longer about making that kind of judgment.

The British public refuse to be bothered, because they very sensibly know that government must go on, and the present lot are the only people likely to be conducting it for a long time ahead. This may be tedious. It's partly to ward off the boredom of Labour's unbreakable domination that the politics of the personal holds such sway. But as a large truth, the furore about Cook, and for that matter Peter Mandelson, is anachronistic. It is misleading about modern times.

Modern British government, instead, is a struggle not with dangerous enemies but with objective problems. In golfing terms, it is stroke-play, not match-play: to beat the course, not to beat an opponent. It's more like a dialogue with an anxious, puzzled, complicit electorate, worried about schools and hospitals and crime and welfare, than a competition for their support against a rampant enemy with a rival power-base, and alternative solutions to these intractable problems.

The typical mode of such government is not Robin Cook teetering on the edge of ruin, but Gordon Brown delivering humourless, repetitive, earnest speeches. such as the one he gave earlier this week in Edinburgh. This was billed as the first of a series in which the cabinet sets out to remind the country what Blairite government is really about.

It will be surprising if Jack Straw, Alistair Darling, David Blunkett, Tony Blair himself, or anyone else roped in to change the new year mood music, rises to any more exciting heights of unpredictability than Mr Brown.

He talked about the new deal, about education, about equipping people for change, about everything he has said before. There was a fleeting moment when he appeared to forsake the Third Way for the Fourth Way, distinguishing Blairism not only from the state planning of the 1960s and the laissez-faire economics of the 1980s but "the corporatism of the 1970s".

This break with the litany of the triplicate surely crashed some MPs' pagers. But it didn't last. The message was about a hard slog towards a better society. It is nothing if not familiar, in its content and its now unchallengeable banality.

This absence of challenge is what makes the Blair experience new. Arrogance is the word that often flows around it, and, for different reasons, both Mandelson and Cook deserve the epithet. But the real shortcoming of this government is that it does not take enough advantage of the unique situation in which it finds itself. It is not confident enough. It doesn't trust the immensity of its strength. It is still locked in the old matrix of calamity, as if the opposition, instead of losing just about all its credibility, were roaring at the gates.

It imputes to the media a power to turn the country against it which the media, having tried hard for the last six months post-honeymoon, seems to have proved it cannot do. Mr Blair's remains the most popular mid-term government ever recorded.

The policy-site where its timidity is most visible is Europe. If a government with so much strength - the first ever backed by a single-party pro-Europe majority in the Commons - does not dare to challenge the anti-Europe blackmailers on the other side, when ever will the deed be done?

But the lesson goes wider. Mr Blair is uniquely placed to see off the moral curmudgeons of his ministers, and then to shed the neurosis of imminent defeat.