Jeremy reviews James Naughtie’s book on the love-hate relationship between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor.

In one of his last Conference speeches as Leader, Paddy Ashdown asked the question – Is Tony Blair a control freak or a pluralist? It’s a question which lies at the heart of much that this very readable book discusses. It charts the relationship between Blair and Brown from their first arrival in Parliament through to the extraordinary love-hate relationship of their second term in Government – a relationship Naughtie is fond of describing as a “political marriage”.

It is clear the Chancellor and Prime Minister are closer to each other than perhaps any previous occupants of their offices. As Naughtie sets out, Blair speaks to Brown constantly on issues across the whole range of Government policy and presentation. Their dual presence is the New Labour Party is all-encompassing. Remarkably, for example, in addition to what you would have thought was a fairly time-consuming role as first Shadow Chancellor and then the real thing, Brown has also been Labour’s Campaign Manager in 1997 and 2001 (in 1997 alongside Mandelson).

And within the economic sphere, it seems that Blair has ceded total control of pretty much anything that could conceivably be viewed as economic or financial to Brown, and simply will not over-rule him on it. When Brown announced four days after the 1997 election independence for the Bank of England – the most important economic decision of the first term, and something that had not even been hinted at during the campaign – apparently the entire extent of the policy discussion between Prime Minister and Chancellor on the subject was that Brown outlined his plans and Blair said simply “Fine”.

Naughtie talks sometimes of a “dual Premiership”. Formal meetings of the Blair Cabinet are famously limited and meaningless – their place is taken by frequent bilaterals between the Government’s two most senior members, and bilateral or small meetings with other Ministers. The pair of them decide the Government’s position, and then inform other Secretaries of State what their view will be.

Blair’s extraordinary refusal to over-rule Brown has thrown up interesting policy conflicts – such as on the Euro – where Brown insists on keeping the decision for himself. We see it perhaps even more clearly on the Tube PPP plan – there are clear popularity dividends to be reaped from ditching it, but Blair quite simply refuses to over-rule Brown. The independence he grants to Brown is even more remarkable because it builds up Brown’s power base within the party, at the expense of Blair’s own position.

Why is this? Some attribute it to a deal done at the famous 1994 Granita dinner, when Brown agreed to stand aside for Blair. Naughtie doesn’t commit himself to a view of the precise words used that night, but his answer to the question is that to over-rule Brown on a clearly financial question such as this would be to destroy utterly the Blair-Brown relationship, and that in the system of Government they have constructed, this is tantamount to tearing down the Government itself. I believe it was Tony Benn who said that New Labour is one of the smallest political parties ever – it just seems big because most of its members are on the Cabinet.

However as Naughtie describes it, their relationship today has moved from close intimacy, and a completely shared purpose, to one in which the principals will even snipe discreetly at each other in public, and their rival camps of supporters are capable of inflicting much greater damage on each other and Labour – Naughtie compares them to the rival Jets and Sharks in West Side Story.

But there remains this extraordinary trust between them, in which Blair quite simply refuses to intervene on issues such as the Euro, which could be the biggest of his second term. This is the paradox at the heart of the New Labour Government.

Reading this book is likely to make you feel that there is nothing at all good about this Labour Government, and Liberal Democrats are not that childish. There are certainly descriptions to make Liberal Democrat blood boil – especially at the monumental arrogance of the leading pair in handling their fellow Ministers, let alone the rest of the country. Anyone looking for differences between the Liberal Democrats and New Labour certainly could find no better expression than the rigidity, paranoia and conceit of the Labour approach, compared to the disciplined but essentially multilateral and – dare one say it – liberal approach which is the DNA structure of our own party.

Even if Jim Naughtie hasn’t benefited from the same level of access to key players, as say Andrew Rawnsley’s Servants of the People, or Donald Macintyre’s superb Mandelson and the making of New Labour, this book provides some interesting insights into the way the Government works. It tells us more than we knew about some notable incidents of the past few years, and is, too, a jolly good read.