This could be a great reforming government. But only if it learns from Blair’s failure

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

You wouldn’t know it from listening to the Prime Minister, but the coalition is on course to be a great reforming administration. In its first 11 weeks, it has announced plans to reform all four major public services. At the same time, its first Budget mandated the largest public spending cuts since the creation of the modern welfare state: a shrinking which goes beyond anything Margaret Thatcher ever attempted. But to achieve its reforming ambitions, the coalition must work out how to steer past the reefs on which past reformers have been wrecked.

Tony Blair was so passionate about reform that speeches on the subject used to bring him out in a sweat. Lord Mandelson recalls in his memoirs how Blair had been warned before the 2005 election that the intensity of his ‘evangelical passion’ for reform was scaring voters. David Cameron, by contrast, appears to be barely aware of his government’s radicalism. When at Prime Minister’s Questions last week he was asked by one of his backbenchers about parents who had been waiting years for a new school to open, he noticeably failed to mention one of his government’s signature initiatives: the right of parents to set up their own state-funded schools.

Yet Cameron still has a better chance of delivering reform than Blair did. The need to make 25 per cent cuts in most departmental budgets means that the status quo — that great enemy of reform — is no longer an option. Blair might have had the passion for reform but Cameron has the moment for it, and that’s what matters.