Presidential Blair 'must change' style of leadership

Report accuses Tony Blair of rewriting constitutional tradition in order to increase his personal power

Supporters of Mr Blair insist that a 21st-century government requires new approaches to leadership

SINCE taking office, Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, has prided himself in his informal style of meetings at No 10 - swapping agendas and minutes for cups of tea and biscuits. However, Lord Butler indicated yesterday that the highly personalised style he uses to run the government has to change.

Yesterday’s report reveals that even when considering decisions of the gravest national interest, the Prime Minister relies on informal, largely unminuted meetings with small groups of colleagues instead of gatherings of the full Cabinet.

Typically, the Prime Minister considers the most momentous issues on the sofa in his "den", the private office at Downing Street, instead of at the coffin-shaped table in the Cabinet room.

Lord Butler, a former Cabinet Secretary, also finds that Mr Blair has restructured many of the key civil service roles that tie the Prime Minister’s authority to the Cabinet and the civil service.

Effectively, the report accuses Mr Blair of rewriting constitutional tradition in order to increase his personal power, the most authoritative condemnation to date of his presidential style of government.

The extent of Mr Blair’s so-called "sofa government" was first laid bare by Lord Hutton’s investigation last year, when the law lord criticised Downing Street over the number of pivotal meetings relating to Dr David Kelly, the government weapons scientist who killed himself last July, which took place outside the formal structure of government and for which no official minutes were taken.

To Mr Blair’s critics, the informal style of administration allows the Prime Minister to evade proper accountability and make decisions, like those relating to Dr Kelly, on a deniable basis.

While some of those surrounding Mr Blair dismiss these complaints as the grumbling of fusty old-school civil servants like Lord Butler, the same worries are shared by a number of contemporary politicians too.

The Butler team took evidence from two former members of Mr Blair’s Cabinet, Robin Cook, the former leader of the House, and Clare Short, the former international development secretary, who told of their frustration at being left out of the most important meeting relating to the war.

David Owen, a former Labour foreign secretary, is understood to have told Lord Butler about his fears that the traditional Cabinet structure around the Prime Minister has been systematically downgraded since the party was elected to power in 1997.

Graham Allen, a former Labour whip who has criticised Mr Blair’s presidential style, last night said the Butler Report proved that the 19th-century traditions that underpin the structure of British government must be modernised.

"It underlines the need to define in law exactly what the premiership is, to set out clearly exactly what a prime minister is entitled to do and what a prime minister is not entitled to do," he said.

Lord Butler’s findings are couched in the almost impenetrable language of Whitehall, but they paint a damning picture nonetheless.

"We are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the government’s procedures which we saw in the context of policy-making towards Iraq risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgment," the report concludes.

From April 2002, the Butler investigation revealed, the most important body involved in discussions over a possible war was not the Cabinet.

Instead, a "small number of key ministers, officials and military officers most closely involved provided the framework of discussion and decision-making within government."

Lord Butler also found that Mr Blair had made some key foreign policy advisers answerable to him personally and not to the head of the civil service.

The effect was "to weight their responsibility to the prime minister more heavily than their responsibility through the Cabinet Secretary to the Cabinet as a whole," the report said.

James Purnell, a Labour MP who was working as a special adviser to Mr Blair when Labour took power in 1997, spoke out in defence of the changes at Downing Street.

"The machinery of government needed to change to cope with the pace of 24-hour news media, also we live in a very complex world now," he said.

Veterans of Labour’s arrival in power recall being shocked at the arrangements in Downing Street.

"Gladstone would have recognised the place if he had walked through the door in 1997," said one last night. "We didn’t even have e-mail when we arrived."

Lord Butler also found that in the run-up to the war, briefing papers written by government officials were not routinely circulated to all Cabinet ministers, instead remaining within a "small circle" of ministers and aides.

Professor Peter Hennessy, arguably the country’s leading scholar of government, said this finding pointed to "a Cabinet failure of heroic proportions" and demonstrated that Mr Blair’s Cabinet had been "by far the most supine since the Second World War".

Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, last night angrily rejected this suggestion. "There is nothing in the slightest bit unusual about organised discussions between a smaller group of ministers," she said.

Still, she hinted that under Mr Blair, Cabinet ministers had actively to seek out some information about the coming war, instead of being informed automatically. "It was always possible to discover what the nuances were," she said.