>If cabinet government is dead, it's in part because cabinet ministers have
>seldom been more feeble. Few of the present lot can hack it as politicians
>who count. No modern government has contained ministers more puppet-like,
>more politically anaemic, more lacking in self-respect, or more cravenly
>submissive to the leader who has supplanted - in their minds as much as
>his - argument or belief with loyalty to himself, as the touchstone of
>political purpose. On their part, this loyalty has less to do with
>passionate respect than with the absence of any alternative thing to be.
>They have no convictions to call their own. New Labour turns out to be a
>thin cadre of administrators, many of them bad.
Chris Burford
London