Getting the Memoirs In Early

With the risk of "re-education" temporarily in abeyance as the Beloved Leader prepares to lay down his burden, it appears the apparatchiks are starting to feel safe enough to aim a few farewell shafts at his back. Lord Butler, who was cabinet secretary until eight months into the Vicar of Downing Street's ministry, has revealed the not altogether astonishing news that his reverence treated the tradition of cabinet government with approximately the same respect as he treats parliamentary scrutiny and democratic accountability. According to Lord Butler, during the eight months after the 1997 election, the sole decision taken by the cabinet was about the Millennium Dome: "And the only way they could get that decision was Tony Blair left the room to go to a memorial service and John Prescott was left chairing the meeting. There were in fact more people against than for it and the one thing that John Prescott could get agreement to was that they should leave it to Tony. That was the one decision."

Lord Butler contrasts his reverence with Margaret Thatcher, who "felt she had to get the cabinet's agreement" - a difficult job, no doubt, given the way she used to pack her cabinets with worshipful thugs like Norman Tebbit and Nicholas Ridley and complaisant batrachians like Leon Brittan and Kenneth Baker. Thatcher's successor, whose name escapes me at the moment, "used the cabinet less and less as his government was riven by divisions and indiscipline", which might have been a shrewd move if it had meant he made any decisions himself. His reverence, by contrast, began by treating the cabinet more or less as his personal public-relations team: "What are the issues of the week and what is our message about them? Not discussions or decisions about policy." Later, of course, once he had history, God and George W Bush to back him up, his reverence was able to show us what British democracy can really mean when it is placed in the hands of someone who believes, hand on heart, what he believes.