There are some inside Downing Street that are beginning to wish their leader hadn’t been quite so keen on being the first in to see Obama – it’s like insisting on checking out a friend’s new home when they haven’t had time to shop and can only serve a pauper’s omelette for dinner. Had you waited, you might have seen the sofa in place and got a proper meal.
Sure – there was cache in being first European mate through the door, but the omelette was not particularly sustaining (something the Obamas knew – an op note to staffers in the London American embassy described the trip as a ‘spray’. That means just what it sounds like – wobbly cameras and journalist questions little more than heckles. The Obama administration had no intention of anything more – until the UK press sulked).
The president was unable to agree to very much at all because he has barely got a team in place. Much has been made of the fact that Brown’s mates are now running the White House – Robert Reich, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers – but the echelon below that, and indeed almost every rung below, remains empty. The corollary is a shrinking of access, not an expansion. ‘We used to have Larry Summers in No 10 every six weeks or so,’ said a Downing Street staffer. ‘Now it’s never. It’s kind of frustrating.’ It’s caused some to mutter that a trip to the White House may have been better served a few months hence.
Instead, preparations for the G20 will continue apace, even though Obama has barely ‘read in’ and the divisions grow like the San Andreas fault. The Europeans want what spending there is to be concentrated on infrastructure, the Americans and Brits want demand side measures to stimulate spending. Inside No 10 the G20 is expected to yield very little, except the setting for Obama with an opportunity to glad-hand 19 of his peers in one morning – a bit like parents’ evening, they might as well just erect a tressle table somewhere on the Downing Street tarmac and have world leaders file up for five minutes with Barack. Though European leaders are more likely to be pushing to limit spending rather than increase it, GB can at least point to a second more recent fiscal stimulus: the actual G20 summit itself costs some £50m – a fiscal stimulus for Docklands, if nothing else. Not Obama’s $700bn … but a start.
Reforming zeal
Meanwhile, normality breaks out – at last: a white paper on public service reform. And it’s less reform and more public-service-fast-forward. Bankers out of work? Get them into teaching on a slashed course. There will be new eBay rankings for hospitals. Reform. On speed. But it was relief for all involved to hear about something other than the recession – internal Downing Street polling show the party does better when it talks about education and healthcare.
One of the key imperatives around the launch was to let the talented Liam Byrne have his time in the sun. Yes, he has a role at the heart of government but over the last few months he’s actually had to be quite frustratingly quiet for fear of pissing off ministers with real portfolios. So this white paper was a small consolation, when, sitting two desks away from the prime minister, you are made to keep so quiet on so many things. There was even talk that in redressing the balance, Byrne had put noses out of joint by ‘taking the lead’ – irking the very irkable Ed Balls and Alan Johnson.
Except for some it was too familiar a record, with one minister saying ‘it was all a bit 1997’. For this minister, the next stage has to be about less public services, not more. ‘Don’t they realise that the next stage of public service reform – which we need to announce ahead of the next election – is putting a floor on public spending?’ the minister told the Insider. ‘We need to tell the public, we were prepared to recapitalise the banks up to a certain level and we are prepared to do so for public services, but the emphasis has to be on a “certain level”. But we need to tell the electorate we are going to do so, do it, and soon.’
Job for Jon
And the ‘soon’ may be after the European elections. The forward planners are looking ahead to June – meltdown in these polls and then a reshuffle. Labour backbenchers, whips and ministers alike see the BNP looming large on the horizon. Nick Griffin may even become the BNP’s first MEP – he’s standing in the north-west region: last time they polled at 6.8 per cent and they only need to increase that to 8 per cent to get a seat. Last month, they won a Labour council seat in Sevenoaks and took 28 per cent of the vote in a Leicestershire election.
So there is annoyance in circles swirling to the right of the prime minister that the man supposedly in charge of ensuring a concerted push back against the BNP is Jon Cruddas. ‘I suppose we have to be grateful he hasn’t published anything yet,’ said one senior Labour source, himself fighting a very heavy BNP presence in his constituency, ‘because as and when he does it will all be couched in bloody socialist language. Jon would be so great without the leftwing bit.’