Anthony Barnett (London, OK): There is a long and very interesting interview with Blair's Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell in Saturday's Guardian, by Ian Katz. Lots to say about this including his revealing rejection that he was involved in any illegality of loans for peerages (he was interviewed by the police three times, apparently, twice under caution). "That doesn't mean to say conversations... people take conversations in different ways, and whether it gets close to the edge in such conversations, of course that can happen, yes."
This is the Jonathan Powell I briefly knew in the run-up to the 1997 election. He impressed me as someone who was exceptionally professional, effective and precise in a political world that was vague, often bullying and incompetent. On Northern Ireland he told me on the phone before the election that Blair thought he had "just one chance" for peace. I remember thinking that this sounded like Blair's hype, a striking phrase even if true, but that it sounds as though Powell himself really believed it and wanted to act accordingly. So it proved, it seems he never let go and did the grinding follow-up year after year, after the glamour and headlines of the Good Friday Agreement were long past. Making a settlement work is often harder than reaching it. If this was indeed his achievement then it's exceptional: a man at the centre of the old regime determined to resolve an issue on the periphery.
But there is one passing comment in the interview which signals Powell's New Labour mentality. Asked about his being a member of the establishment, given that one of his brothers was Thatcher's Chief of Staff, he says:
"I'm of the establishment but anti-establishment." He counts it a disappointment that Labour failed seriously to challenge the establishment. "What we sort of did was create a new establishment, which was pretty much like the old establishment but with slightly different people... I was really struck a year into government when I went off to [a function for Argentina's Carlos Menem] and I just noticed it was all the Helena Kennedys of this world who were preening themselves as the new establishment."
Don't you believe it! It is fascinating how the regime hates Helena. They created various networks of loyalty and obligation, whose strings could be pulled. But New Labour willfully refused to replace the establishment whose hollowed-out routines it put to the sword. Any project of change needs a surrounding intelligentsia to provide the essential reinforcement for 'transformative' reform and some vital independence of judgement and debate. I've clashed with Martin Wolf on this in a number of posts. The old establishment was, of course, profoundly undemocratic and socially closed - it could be penetrated and prided itself on its capacity to renew its membership, but you had to want to be a 'chap' and undergo its ritual humiliations to become a member. But its role in a country governed by informal norms was as a vital check on the executive. It had some independence and autonomy, it could call time on bad behaviour, its rules and self-belief saved the UK from many abuses, indeed while it was clearly undemocratic arguably it prevented dictatorship.
Helena would have been an ideal member of a new, more democratic establishment, someone with strong core values and lots of practical experience, who could be won by argument but not bought or suborned, for she had her own relationship with the public. If there had been a 'new establishment' we would not now be arguing about 42 days, for example. Far from New Labour even trying to seed and develop an autonomous establishment to which it would be answerable it did everything it could to ensure one wasn't created.
