Harold Clarke's security Bill has generated spectacular change in the Tory disposition, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
'Nobody believes a word he says any more." Crafting that anti-Blair soundbite was probably the best day's work of Iain Duncan Smith's ill-fated leadership of the Conservative Party. Yet on the issue which brought the prime minister close to defeat in the Commons last Monday even some Conservatives think it could be successfully redirected at Duncan Smith's successor, as the role-reversal at the top of British politics continues to astound.
We already knew that Britain's neo-con prime minister was running for re-election on a safety and security ticket which contrives to link everything from legislation on antisocial behaviour to the "war" on international terrorism. But nothing had quite prepared us for the emergence of Michael "Prison Works" Howard as champion of Britons' civil liberties.
Yet the Conservative leader was able to taunt Blair that some 60 Labour MPs had "supported" him in reducing the government's majority to just 14 in the vote on Home Secretary Charles Clarke's proposal to take the power to subject British as well as foreign nationals to house arrest.
The prime minister accused Howard of "playing politics" with national security, although he stopped short of the usual charge of "opportunism". That might not have been a correct assessment in the circumstances, given polling evidence that the majority of people support the government's plan to subject terrorist suspects to a range of control orders.
Indeed this may have increased the surprise of leading Labour rebels such as Clare Short and Robin Cook at finding themselves in the same lobby as Howard.
Most, if not all, of 150 eminent lawyers, bishops, playwrights, singers and fashion designers who placed a full-page newspaper advertisement decrying Clarke's Bill as a "visible injustice" may also have been pleasantly surprised by the change in the Conservative disposition.
And this is change on a spectacular scale. The Conservative leadership is now receptive to the view that house arrest is something associated with the dark days of apartheid South Africa.
Yet the same Conservative Party was not so afflicted with concern when former home secretary David Blunkett decided to derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights in order to be able to intern foreign terror suspects in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks on the United States.
Nor did they always maintain a distinction between what government might legitimately do to foreign nationals as opposed to its own citizens.
Until Labour took power in 1997 the Conservatives annually renewed Northern Ireland emergency provisions including the power of detention.
There is no record of then home secretary Michael Howard objecting to this violation of ancient principles of justice. Nor did he bow to objections to a Prevention of Terrorism Act containing a power of internal exile.
It is true they did not use the power after the disastrous experience of internment in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. However ministers maintained they needed to keep it on the statute book for use in an emergency.
Clarke argues much the same thing now. The current powers to detain foreign suspects, deemed discriminatory and unlawful by the Law Lords, expire shortly.
Clarke and Blair say the absence of an alternative power will leave the country dangerously exposed as it heads into a general election amid fears of a Madrid-style bomb attack.
Howard dismisses this, saying the government has powers-a-plenty and that, anyway, he would vote with the government to renew the existing detention powers for a period of months to allow parliament to consider properly the issue again after the election.
The Conservative counter-charge is that it is Blair who is playing politics, hoping to cast them as "soft on terrorism". And at this writing it even seems possible that Blair could be forced to reconsider Howard's offer.
Lord Ackner, a former Law Lord, yesterday reported alarm at the highest levels of the judiciary at compromise proposals which would have a judge and not the home secretary decide the case for house arrests and, possibly, the whole lesser range of control orders by which the citizens' liberty could be restrained.
Ironically this is the minimum demanded by Cook and other Labour rebels if the Bill is to survive its final Commons vote. It is ironic, too, that Clarke's better instincts inclined him to the view that the decision to suspend a citizen's liberty - on the basis of intelligence and evidence which need not be divulged to the accused person - was properly a matter for the minister and the executive.
The Northern Ireland experience showed that to dress internment in quasi-judicial garb was to bring the law itself into contempt.
As Ackner told the BBC, "it sounds so much better to say 'we're leaving it to the judge' " when, in reality, if it is not to be done by "due process" the judge in fact is being used as a rubber stamp for a decision of the executive.
Doubts now about the willingness of the judges to assume this role seem certain to increase the nervousness on Labour's backbenches and to make less likely a possible Conservative climbdown at the last moment.
Yet if the government's Bill is lost it will not be down to Howard. Indeed one whispered explanation for his about-turn on these issues is a palpable change in culture and climate for which many hold Blair primarily responsible. The "Irish" experience of miscarriages of justice undoubtedly undermined the willingness of many citizens automatically to trust the authorities.
Above all, however, it is the widespread belief that Blair took the country to war on a false prospectus - and Guantánamo, and Belmarsh, and much else that has followed in its wake - that has eroded the trust on which Blair was previously able to count, most importantly inside his own Labour Party.
Whatever Howard's motivation, the real problem with that IDS soundbite is that it speaks now for many people who would want to trust Blair but simply can't be sure that they can or should.