There’s a very insightful column by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian today. What’s interesting about it is that Freedland tries to stand back, to try and see what New Labour’s gathering crisis might look like from the vantage point of, say, 30 years hence. “Blairism was not merely a continuation of Thatcherism”, he writes.

In dialectical terms, it can claim to be a synthesis of the free-market revolution and the welfarism that preceded it. For while New Labour embraced the market, it insisted market forces could not be left entirely unfettered: there needed to be a minimum wage and at least some (though not all) of the labour protections enshrined in the European social chapter.

Blairism also understood that the public realm mattered, that few people wanted to live in a world of, in the late JK Galbraith’s words, private affluence and public squalor. So New Labour would happily follow Thatcherite strictures on the economy, but would no longer tolerate persistent neglect of the public sphere. They would invest billions in schools and hospitals that had been starved of cash for decades.

Now this synthesis is becoming a consensus of its own. Few expect David Cameron’s Conservatives to roll back the minimum wage or the social chapter. The Tories promise to maintain spending on education and health; they insist they want to eradicate child poverty.

Freedland suspects that we will come to see this period as the moment

when the limits of the New Labour synthesis were exposed. For at least seven years, Labour has sunk huge amounts of cash into the state. It has tried scheme after scheme to make it more efficient: setting targets, issuing directives, oiling, buffing and shining its creaky and rusted machinery. And yet it still isn’t working properly.

This isn’t because Blair & Co have been incompetent or that a different group of people would have done the job better.

It is rather a structural problem with the British state. Its machinery was designed for a 20th-century world that no longer exists. Today’s citizens are used to fast, efficient, wireless services that give them a high degree of personal choice; the lumbering bureaucracy of the state cannot catch up. Nor will aping the private sector, pretending government can be run like Domino’s Pizza or DHL, work – because health, education and public safety are not like garlic bread or packages. They are much more complex to deliver.

Now we’re getting somewhere. That’s why there’s been so much belated bleating suddenly about “systemic failure”. Freedland quotes the former Downing Street adviser Charles Leadbeater.

He said we were witnessing the failure of the “McKinsey state”, the Blair experiment in trying to run government like a big company, complete with management consultants and their expensive advice. “They wanted to make the sausage machine deliver a better product,” Leadbeater explains. “But that approach, of target-driven public-service reform, that Blair and [John] Birt bought into in a big way, is just exhausted.”

Amen to that. The £64 billion question is: does Gordon Brown understand this?

John Prescott arrived at 7.45am. He left just before 11am, looking cheerful – and no wonder, for he had expected to lose his job, but has held on to his title, his car, his driver and his country house (with croquet lawn) while shedding his entire work load. Lottery jackpot winners have settled for less.

Simon Hoggart, writing in today’s Guardian

John Prescott has been stripped of his departmental responsibilities, but he keeps his Cabinet place (and the accompanying salary), as well as various perks (such as two Grace & Favour houses). Given the allegations that emerged over the weekend about his behaviour towards a female subordinate, this is astonishing.

What’s even more astonishing is the way the media have swallowed the government line that his sexual misdemeanours are a private matter. If he were the CEO of a public company, then his sexual harassment of a subordinate would already have led to his departure — if only because a juicy lawsuit would be imminent. But he continues as the UK’s Deputy PM. All of which makes Catherine Bennett’s icy column worth reading. Sample:

Miraculous to relate, Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and a host of columnists appear, for once, to agree on something. John Prescott’s use of a secretary for sexual purposes was “a private matter”.

If, as seems likely, this view prevails, when Blair next takes a holiday this country will be led by a man we have long known to be a violent, inarticulate oaf and now know to be a violent, inarticulate, sexually predatory oaf. At least no one could call us elitist.

How will it be for the women secretaries, civil servants and political colleagues who must continue to work alongside him? Fine, perhaps, when they remember the prime minister’s assurance that this is a private matter. Simply because Prescott assigned his secretary various challenging sexual tasks, and is alleged to have attempted the molestation of at least one other woman, that is no reason to suppose he will lift up the skirt of Tessa Jowell, or look down the front of Margaret Hodge, or harass other senior women who do not appeal to him, or talk dirty to them at staff parties, or turn his assessing gaze on their cleavage, speculating on the kind of underwear that might be supporting it. That is something he only does to his juniors. In private…

There’s more…

Luminaries of New Labour, that most enlightened hammer of sexual and all other forms of discrimination, are defending a man whose lewd approaches to a junior colleague – it will be obvious to almost any other employer or employee in the land – should make him a candidate for immediate suspension. Not to mention an enormous compensation claim on the part of his secretary. A private matter? In a lap-dancing club, perhaps. But this was the civil service. Aside from the choice of locations, a sexual connection this rudimentary, bereft of any romantic trimmings, so closely resembles unpaid prostitution that, given Prescott’s public position, the abuse of power more than justifies the public interest. At what point, during this administration, was the propositioning, at work, of subordinates, redefined as an irrelevant and entirely personal peccadillo?

Great stuff.

The media consensus is that Blair’s last-ditch reshuffle of his Cabinet was “brutal”, and so indeed it was. Two days ago, for example, he refused to accept Charles Clarke’s offer to resign; today he sacked him. But for me the really interesting aspect of the reshuffle is the way it has brought to the fore young Blair loyalists like David Miliband and Alan Johnson. Regular readers will remember that some time ago I surmised that Blair doesn’t want Gordon Brown to succeed him and is therefore trying to ensure that there is a credible younger candidate in place to challenge the Chancellor when the time eventually comes for him (Blair) to stand down.

One way of reading today’s reshuffle is that it has been designed with that objective in mind. And to be fair to Blair (though I have no desire to be), he might be motivated by something other than spite. He may want Labour to continue in power after he’s gone, and suspects that only a younger man stands a chance of defeating the new bicycling Tory leader.

Later: Then there’s the interesting question of why Jack Straw was demoted? I was puzzled by this — he seemed to be doing ok, relatively speaking. But Ewen MacAskill has has sussed it: Straw said a military strike against Iran was inconceivable. Blair thinks differently. So Straw had to go. Ye Gods!

From BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson’s excellent Blog, on his interview with the sacked Home Secretary, Charles Clarke…

I’ve often interviewed resigning ministers, but this was amongst the bizarrest. When I was called to be told the news, I was naked in bed in a Westminster hotel hoping to get at least an hour’s sleep, having stayed up all night covering the local elections. The interesting discovery I’ve made is that you can go from being in bed to attending a resignation statement in exactly seven minutes.

Er, bizarrest???

Nice blog entry by the BBC’s Political Editor, Nick Robinson…

Today Tony Blair claimed that the deportation of foreign prisoners was not a problem his government had created – but one that they were solving. (“Oh that’s alright then” I hear you cry). Having airily dismissed his failure to implement his old policy, he turned to the future and pledged to introduce a new one. A change of the law will mean that the working assumption will be that all foreign criminals will be deported whatever their crime rather than – as now – merely considered for deportation if their sentence is longer.

Just like Margaret Thatcher before him, Tony Blair has the ability to ask what on earth the government is up to – like a caller to a radio phone-in – and then promise to sort it out…