There is always the possibility that this is yet another case of the modern malaise of a ploddy box-ticking belt-and-braces jobsworth approach to a crisis. Don’t we feel this may have afflicted social services as well as the police? Procedures are followed obsessively, and no ordinary persepective remains. After all, one false step and the media and lawyers pounce.

But here’s another possibility. The police seem to have suspected that Mr Green had been cavalier with state information in documents and emails. If he had, then the police might have felt they needed to shut down Mr Green’s communications before the shredder and hard drive scrubber had been deployed to brush over the tracks in the sand.

As to the central issue, we ought to accept that government has mostly to be done in private. It is about negotiations which end up in deals. These are seldom pretty, and people in power have to be free to take unattractive positions as things get discussed. For all that we love parliamentary and media access to the doings of the state, there are also other principles at work here.

Principles and practicalities too. The less trust there is between ministers and civil servants, the more governments will resort to private and informal discussion. We’ve had enough of that, thank you. We need less deviousness in government, not more.

It may be that the Home Office civil servant who is also thought perhaps to be involved in the alleged leaks to Mr Green was himself a valuable whistleblower exposing genuine Government misbehaviour to a properly privileged recipient. In which case the police really will have damaged their own reputation

We’ll see. In the meantime, I take with a huge pinch of salt the political and journalistic outrage at what’s happened so far. It works from the assumption that leaking is always good when actually it rather seldom is.

Too typically, Sir Antony Jay trotted out the old nonsense that the Civil Service doesn’t want results, it wants its own comfort. (You can easily listen again to the item, 18/11/08, 08.45 am.) Denis McShane, who, to put it politely, is always as polite as he possibly can be, said that Yes Minister (Jay’s famous show) was documentary and pure fact. 

Jay presented his case that the Civil Service exists to subvert democratically elected politicians.

He said ministers have to tell their ministries: “You’re not telling me what to do, I’m telling you what to do”, and they have to ask themselves, “Do you run the department or does the department run you?”

He went on to say that the Civil Service feel ministers come and go and it’s important to house train them. “The Civil Servant habit of thought is, ‘You don’t want ministers to achieve things, you want them to do what you want.’”

At times, he seemed to argue that the parties could be as bad as each other: “A lot of the time minsters and the Civil Service are in collusion, but sometimes in collision.” They he got back to the old mntra: When they did collide, he thought the minister must be right.

Denis McShane made a much more bluntly silly allegation: “The Civil Service represents the eternal interets of the British State and ministers operate, at least in theory, in the interest of the British people.” Perhaps aware that this was barmy stuff, he then said he admired the Civil Servants who had served him and are still there and care about the public interests. Obviously, he can’t have it both ways.

Of course, politicians and Civil Servants have diferent approaches and even different interests. The Civil Service may well be concerned to preserve the status quo.

What is forgotten, though, is that it is New Labour’s great failure to have wasted much of its tenure in dismantling the reforms which the Tories had introduced to public management. The Government then had to spend a lot of time reinstating those very reforms. To be honest, the Civil Service was rightly sceptical of the merit of New Labour’s behaviour in government, not least as the government subverted very valuable habits of government - such as having serious Cabinet meetings and a fairly coherent approach to policy.

Edward Mortimer, an impeccable liberal and UN man, reminded his Financial Times readers that Bush was a quite a reliable UN man in the sense of paying more of the US’s promised dues than most and quite often pursuing shared goals with the organisation.

What’s more, Mortimer reminds us, President Bill Clinton (more of a hawk sometimes than the left likes to remember) was not especially in love with the UN and quite often was at odds with it.

Mortimer argues that President Obama may well be a multilateralist breath of fresh air. But he warns us not expect too much. Obama’s task is very difficult: the US “is an exceptional country”, and Bush is not as easy to surpass as might be supposed.

By the way, President Bush was also perhaps the President most interested and generous with development aid and help for HIV/AIDS. Go figure.

The most important point is that this is an historic run, in the sense of looking backward. Barack Obama’s campaign has been about the overhang race and slavery has produced in America. Of course it is also pivotal: win or lose, Obama’s run makes it clear that in the American future it will be harder to blame political failure on one’s colour. Still, even if this campaign is changing America, it is the prejudiced past which has dominated this election.

We know this is true because we know that Barack Obama would not have got as far as he has had he been white. Neither white liberals nor the majority of blacks would have warmed to him as a white man. 

There are lots of wonderful elements to a campaign which has energised the young and the black electorates, including (a pessimist might say) a dangerous appetite for the messianic in too many Obama supporters. They want him to be The Change – to be that transformative being who can sprinkle stardust over obdurate reality. We can only hope that the candidate hasn’t fallen for messianism himself. That would bring him into Tony Blair territory.

Obama is an interesting candidate, for sure. He is fluent, cool and easy in his skin. He is steely, ruthless or tough according to your taste. In all these respects he reminds us of Blair. 

But we should not pursue that comparison too far. The essential thing about Blair was that he had a class chip on his shoulder. It was incomprehensible, but it was there. He acted working class. Obama does not seem to be pretending to be anything. He’s not pretending to be from the hood. He’s not pretending to come from a redneck state, as George W Bush did with his faux-Texan identity. And he’s not playing the feel-your-pain card as Bill Clinton seemed to do with his fractured background.

Actually, though, one could say that Obama is pretending to be black and that is something which wits often laid at Bill Clinton’s door. One of the reasons race will change in America is that there’ll be too much mixing up of the races for racism to work well. Like an increasing number of blacks, Obama is genetically half-white. It should be meaningless to ask whether he is white or black culturally, and not much comfort that it is a question more importantly asked by blacks than whites. But I do think it is fair to accuse Barack Obama of having pretended to have found his former pastor Wright’s cast of mind attractive. I think too highly of Barack to believe that he meant it. I prefer to believe that Obama could not resist hoovering up a little more blackness than he felt, or even that he felt the need to live out a blackness which was as near to authentic simplicity as he could find. 

Unlike nearly everyone, I disliked Obama’s race speech in Philadelphia this March. It tried to argue that blacks had to be allowed the awfulness of some of their race-based rhetoric. The speech had two great merits. It worked. And it showed how powerful and awful the legacy of race remains in America. I don’t say Obama was wrong to make the speech, but it remains a pandering effort. It reminded us that the man who has helped knife race as a political issue and to transcend it, could only achieve power by sloshing nonsense over this key issue.

I am ambivalent about the prospect of an Obama presidency partly because it ought to matter that if Obama had been white he would not have been on offer. We would presumably be debating the merits of a Hillary Clinton candidacy. Mrs Clinton would equally have been an identity politics candidate, so there’s some parity there. But Senator McCain would be looking better than he does now. He would have been fighting a routine candidate, not The One.

About three-quarters of the time, Senator McCain has said far wiser and more decent things than Senator Obama. But he has also seemed less steady than one requires of a President. So one isn’t thrilled by the choice to be made between the two men.

I feel much warmer toward an Obama presidency when I consider the following. The whole world, let alone America, needs the US to have a black president at some point and probably right now. Good or bad, blackness will be a hugely valuable factor in an American president at this moment. And I mean abroad as much as at home. The wider non-caucasian world will note Obama’s colour and his middle name. It will help them get over themselves.

It is also hugely valuable that Barack Obama seems like a black man who is less hung up by his race and has given it far fewer political hostages than it is likely another black politician would have managed. 

Maybe merely by finessing America’s race politics in his own brilliant style Barack Obama has shown the smarts and the reserves a president needs. And hell, he may govern much more like a Republican – a sound government Tory - than anyone supposes. He may govern as the kind of Republican we softies always hoped McCain might have been.

We can be sure of one thing. If he lives and thrives long enough, which we must ardently hope for, he will cease to be The One. And that’ll be two good lessons learned. The race lesson is obvious. The lesson that politics is not religion will be just as useful.

ends

The signs are not good at this moment. The Tories are leaving it perilously late to make well-grounded policy statements. They are having at best a mediocre credit crunch. David Cameron seems a litle too keen to hog the limelight.

Worse, in terms of their presenting themselves as solid, their shadow chancellor seems to have no idea how to draw the line between being a man of the world and being a plaything to the super-rich. 

George Osborne has a private office part-funded by a Rothschild and schmoozes an oligarch client of the Russian mafia state on his yacht while it is moored off the villa of another Rothschild.

This fuels gleeful speculation that David Cameron’s loyalty to an inner coterie of toffs may be unhelpful.

Tending the other way is plain fact that people like Michael Gove are plainly important to the Conservative’s bid for power.  What’s more, the shadow cabinet seems to have its fair share of talent, Eton or not. It could afford to let the maverick David Davis do his diva thing. 

We need every sign that David Cameron is proud of his savvy, grounded heavy-hitters and wants them to develop and promote consistent policy. And care about the proprieties.

Gordon Brown is almost certainly not a great intellect (though he has his fans on that score). He reads serious books, but that proves rather little. According to John Lloyd, Gordon Brown’s thinking is more interestingly of the right than of the left. For a man who wants to get things done, he certainly doesn’t seem very diplomatic. But he may have grasped the right of end of some important sticks. He may be an important figure in the history of 21st Century globalisation.

Gordon Brown is a serious man and seems seriously interested in the world economy. He has spoken rather well about globalisation and the need for open markets, light-touch regulation and the needs of the world’s poor. Several years ago, he developed ideas for how the G8 and others could reduce the debt of the poorest coutries. He has consistently argued for increased state aid flows to the Third World. He has argued for some months that the IMF ought to become an early warning system for the world’s economy. He has suggested that the World Bank become the bank of environmental security as well as economic development. He wants the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank) to bcome the location of international regulatory oversight. 

Actually, there is a good deal of serious doubt that reducing Third World debt has been quite as helpful as supposed, or that increasing aid flows (insofar as it has happened) is all that valuable. In particular, it isn’t obvious that specific Brown proposals from the 1990s on the means of debt reduction have been adopted.

Even now, it isn’t clear quite how original Gordon Brown’s ideas for global financial reform really are. And of course we have no idea how sucessful they will be.

It would be fair to say that Gordon Brown does not seem to have done himself any favours in persuading the rest of the world’s leaders to follow his lead. He seems deliberately at various points to have snubbed his fellow EU leaders and George Bush. 

Still, we may yet come to accept that the “Brown Plan”for dealing with the credit crunch really sprang from his brain and was a success. It may yet emerge that his wider ideas are also really his, and that he steered them into happy reality.

In short, it just possible that this brooding, perhaps paranoid, certainly difficult man had talents which turned out to be hugely valuable.

This site is all about government and in part about the need for politicians to speak truthfully about their role in it. In the modern world, that requires us to unpick personality from policy and phoney perceptions from practical reality. That is why the fantasy premiership of Gordon Brown matters to MBG.

Here’s a good reminder from Sky TV of the unfolding Brown premiership

For a son of the manse, etc, Gordon Brown seemed and seems to have remarkably slight contact with the ordinary standards of truthfulness which in every breath he has told us to expect from him.

Put it this way: with Mr Blair, at least we knew we were getting a theatrical production. We knew what we were getting. Not so with Gordon Brown.

Here was a man who was spun as being above spin. More, he was its antithesis. He was sold as being strong on substance. The narrative his people wove was of a man whose reality was solid, intellectual and serious. He himself inaugurated his premiership as ushering in a new government, of strength and resolve.

The media, always suckers for a change and a narrative, lapped it up. 

For a few months, Gordon Brown was able to seem vaguely strong and silent during a series of crises (a bombing, some flooding and an animal disease outbreak) in which there was a well-oiled state response involving professionals who had no need of much from the Prime Minister. Looking solid was all that was required: a perception management issue.

These were duly spun as masterful performances. There soon followed a series of dents to this story. There were instant initiatives, a U-turn (the 10 percent tax fiasco), indecision (trailed and cancelled general election), prevarication.

We should only be as unkind as necessary. If GB was merely a clunky, unattractive man we could easly warm to him as born that way and so what. But he has allowed himself to be bullied into phoney smiles and an imitation of the touchy-feely which is especially creepy. He is a living embodiment of the wisdom of not pretending to be what one is not unless the performance comes naturally or can be convincing.

We should also remember that Brown has never acquired a reputation for the honesty he trumpets as being his hallmark.

As a dark horse, he need only have kept quiet and delivered solid achievement for others to big-up. But actually, he has always pumped out nonsense about himself and his works. 

Let’s begin with the whole “no more Tory boom and bust” thing. Boom and bust cycles were in much better shape in the last years of Tory government and Brown had only not to mess up that inheritance to have a decent economy. Ditto, independence for the Bank of England. John Major had inaugurated a new openness in the way the Bank’s committee issued its advice on inflation control - all any Chancellor had to do was follow that advice.

Thus leaves aside the deeper problem of whether the tripartite system for financial regulation which Gordon Brown invented has proved fit for purpose. 

In an ordinary politician this lack of frankness would be accepted as normal. But Mr Brown fashioned an image of himself as thriving on a higher standard of truthfulness.

As we were buffeted around in the credit crunch of September and October 2008, Brown repeatedly said that it was a crisis imported from the US. Indeed, it seemed that the UK economic downturn, led by a revaluation of the housing market, was going to be hidden under the US story. Had that worked, it would have been a truly dreadful case of deception.

Of course it won’t work. The degree to which the crisis in the UK financial world was to do with UK government policy will emerge, and Gordon Brown’s culpability with it.

There is plenty of blame to go round, but Gordon Brown won’t escape a share.  

Here’s a prediction. The UK plan which seems to be leading the world in framing what a rescue strategy might look like will emerge as the creation of clever Treasury officials and perhaps of Alistair Darling. Let’s hope Gordon Brown heaps praise on them.

As the plan was announced and huge quantities of tax-payer involvement were put into play, Gordon Brown still seemed to think it was him had worked a miracle. He claimed not so much the high ground as the craggy terrain of solidity:

For savers, for small businesses, and for home owners, we must in an uncertain and unstable world be the rock of stability on which the British people can depend.

This is the first financial crisis of the global age. In extraordinary times, our financial markets ceasing to work, the Government cannot just leave people to be buffeted about.

The next day two Times writers cast quite important doubt on Gordon Brown as The Rock. Peter Riddell, never unnecessarily brutal, said that Brown had a dangerous habit of avoiding any admission of vulnerability, not least in refusing to admit the country was in recession. Camilla Cavendish said she would have more faith in Brown’s claims to know how to regulate world finance if he had managed to regulate UK finances well.

It was interesting that Mr Brown’s main move was to insist that he would be relying less on party political special advisers and more on civil servants. In practice, he chose to surround himself with a cadre of civil servants who had proven themselves to him quite personally, not least whilst serving him at his notoriously closed and cliquey Treasury. It matters a great deal that this may have have compromised them as impartial, apolitical bureaucrats. But it is worth noting that Mr Brown has picked them out, and held them close. That is almost the reverse of what he wanted us to believe. It is the opposite of the ideal whereby it is the Civil Service which deploys its forces, rather than ministers.

Sue Cameron, of the Financial Times, has long made a study of the relationship between Westminister and Whitehall. Here are several of her pieces for the FT which log the almost paranoid clannishness of Gordon Brown’s premiership as it emerged (rather quickly) when he became PM.

Hole at the heart of government
Sue Cameron
FT
2 September 2008

Brown bunker traps Sir Gus
Sue Cameron
FT
4 November 2007

Prowler Brown goes walkabout
Sue Cameron
FT
4 December 2007

Uncle Joe Brown?
Sue Cameron
FT
8 June 2007

Whitehall starts singing the blues
Sue Cameron
FT
29 April 2008

.. the NHS in London declared on May 6th that the consultation had shown broad support for the plan, citing the 51% of respondents who had backed the proposal that almost all GP practices should be part of a polyclinic. That less-than-ringing vote of confidence seems particularly hollow as only 5,000 individuals and organisations responded. Almost a third of those filling in the questionnaire worked for the NHS, and just 3,760 answered the question on polyclinics. The determination of the London NHS to press ahead regardless inspires little confidence in Lord Darzi’s recent pledge that local people would have a say in changes arising from his national review.

The point here is that old-fashioned government always knew how to consult with important interest groups, including those representing minorities and so on. Our modern age is supposed to have devised ways of consulting with The People in some Big Conversation (in one New Labour formulation). It doesn’t seem to have worked in some new way, and yet its dubious results are still paraded as though evidence of a new way of doing business.

David Cameron was making one of his toga-moment speeches, and no harm in that. He is keen - as all politicians are - to say that government is over-centralised and should be devolved, decentralised and generally returned to civil society, local authorities and The People.

The problem that local authorities attract few voters and spend mostly national money rather scuppers some of that. But the concern here is that the anti-Whitehall bias. DC was talking as though we could have some internet-driven “Wisdom of the Crowd” and that it would be fairer and more efficient than anything civil servants could give us. Here’s a flavour of what he said:

The bureaucratic age

I have described the 20th century as the ‘bureaucratic age’. With huge advances in communications and travel, it became possible to concentrate power in the central state. Wise men in Whitehall had a monopoly of both information and capability…….

At the same time, our national culture emphasised conformity and knowing your place. There was a sense that top-down control was not only practical and efficient, but that it was also fair and moral.

So even after the denationalisation of the economy, the apparatus of civic and social organisation remains firmly under central control. Schools, hospitals, police forces, town councils… all are remotely controlled by central government.

The post-bureaucratic age

I believe that it’s time to abandon that model once and for all. It is not fair and moral, just as it is not practical and efficient, for the state to control society….. Society no longer emphasises conformity and knowing your place…

Democratic control

Why? Two reasons. First, because local democratic control works, well - locally: it allows communities to tailor customised solutions to local problems, rather than having to fit into a national template.

And second - perhaps paradoxically - local control works nationally too. Diversity strengthens the country as a whole. From diversity and competition and picking up tips from each other and making mistakes and learning from them….