ANGELA MERKEL: GOVERNMENT IS FOR GROWN-UPS

One of the most annoying aspects of New Labour's zenith, fortunately now long passed, was its adulation by journalists who should have known better. Amongst the most fawning of these was the Financial Times senior editor Phillip Stephens, who wrote a biography of former prime minister Blair which has been summed up as "engaging and slickly presented but ultimately lacking in depth". Sounds very New Labour! Along with Blair, Stephens was sounding off last week about Britain's response to the crisis in Syria. Thankfully, we now live in a post-Blair world where parliamentary democracy might actually mean something.

I say "might" because we are not there yet. At the heart of New Labour was a fundamental confusion between politics and government, from which the present Coalition has not yet fully emerged. The ultimate author of this confusion was probably Peter Mandelson rather than Tony Blair. Indeed, Mandelson's autobiography, "The Third Man" published in 2010, is a very good book about politics, but weak on government. As a potted history of the Labour Party from the 1970s it is excellent. Similarly, if one enjoys chintzy insights into the private lives of politicians, the book is eminently readable. However, nowhere does New Labour emerge in it as a credible party of government, and "The Third Man" often comes across as an elegantly written teen diary, whose middle youth protagonists are endlessly pre-occupied with their group status and latest relationship.

To some extent New Labour was also a coalition in all but name, with Lord Mandelson as its king-maker. We now have a genuine Coalition of political expediency and weak government. This has more to do with the composition of the present coalition, rather than the weakness of coalition government per se. Ministerial positions have tended to be allocated to those most politically acceptable to their party leaders, rather than to those best equipped to make the government work for the nation. The same was also true of New Labour. The result is that some of the most able people are excluded from power and thus seek to undermine it. Who ever leads the next government, therefore, needs to look elsewhere for models of coalition leadership, for there is a good chance that the UK (or England, Wales and Northern Ireland) could have another one after the next election. 

If Blair was the defining European politician in the early years of the twentieth century, the German Chancellor Merkel has succeeded him in this role, but through substance rather than spin. The new generation of British politicians would do well to look to her style of leadership at home and abroad. Whilst this leadership is not without critics, particularly in those parts of the continent which have borne the brunt of European Union austerity measures to tackle the sovereign debt crisis, it has demonstrated the difference between politics and government. I was surprised that Angela Merkel hardly receives a mention in his autobiography, although Lord Mandelson was European Trade Commissioner when she came to power. His failure to recognise a woman who would emerge as one of the world's most powerful leaders, and a country whose economy was very much on the ascendant, clearly demonstrates that successful government requires grown-ups (and a mature media) to run it.