On the day that Tony Blair left the Commons chamber for the last time (to a standing ovation led by the leader of the opposition) I was moved from Education to Health and, a few days later, was to accompany the new prime minister on his first official engagement — to a hospital in Kingston-upon-Thames.
I wandered into the PM’s office next to the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street early on that Saturday morning and noticed that something was missing. The sofa had gone. Gordon Brown had wasted no time in differentiating himself from a predecessor to whom the words ‘sofa government’ along with ‘spin’, ‘spads’ and ‘Iraq’ had attached themselves pejoratively like barnacles to a ship’s hull.
Gordon’s venture into furniture removal was superficial because, as Jon Davis and John Rentoul detail in this fascinating retrospective, the days when policy could be set from scratch by up to 25 competing egos sitting round the cabinet table had vanished long before. That sofa had been a convenient place for the PM to chat informally with colleagues and as far as I remember there was always a note-taker present. Cabinet was perfectly free to discuss policy as and when it wished to. I well remember John Prescott conducting a forensic critique of an education white paper almost line by line at cabinet when Ruth Kelly was education secretary.
This book is largely about how the Blair government worked rather than what it did. It draws upon the rich seam of material from a host of distinguished contributors to Davis’s and Rentoul’s University of London and King’s College courses which they’ve run for the past ten years.
We hear a whole range of voices with a unique and previously unheard contribution to make.
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