A Week in Floyd

THAT old revolutionary Roy Hattersley was at it again in Monday's Guardian. "Twenty years ago, when he worked for me, I attempted to convince Tony Blair that the rejection of ideology is an ideology in itself," stormed Red Roy, before going on to lambast the PM for his unhealthy obsession with privatising public services, again.

It's obvious that Roy is pirouetting on a familiar sixpence here, but the ideology of non-ideology is an issue that seems destined to keep rearing its ugly head every time another Blairite bonehead gushes their enthusiasm for "what works."

Even Bill Clinton, the godfather of the Third Way, believes in things.

I know because I'm just approaching the 800-page mark of his whopping 957-page autobiography.

While the first 450 pages are a little bit dull in places, you do get the distinct impression that the ex-President actually spent some of his formative years developing something approaching a political philosophy.

As socialists, we probably disagree with the vast majority of things he believes in (the ability of free-market capitalism to make the world a better place, for example) but he did state his beliefs in a fair number of things - like balanced budgets and performance-related pay for teachers - and spent his political career trying to enact them.

The only thing that Big Tony clearly believes in is God.

This might be OK if he believed in the God who, using the medium of his son, asked us to sell all our worldly goods and give the money to the poor.

After all, as somebody once said, property is theft.

Unfortunately, it seems that Tony believes in the traditional Old Testament God, the God who was always up for a bit of smiting of the enemy but wasn't always entirely clear about just what the motivation for this smiting was.

Blair would be an accident waiting to happen, but unfortunately he's happened already.

Some of you might remember a minor political rupture just over a year ago when Health Secretary Alan Milburn whipped off his rubber gloves and washed his hands of the nation's hospitals in order to spend more time with his family (and to work at developing a loving relationship with the private healthcare industry).

It seemed inevitable that the Milburn family would eventually deliver their verdict on that particular decision and, sure enough, this week's papers have reported that Al is poised for a return to the Cabinet.

Moving in the opposite direction, apparently destined for at least nine months of school concerts and relationship-building games of French cricket with the kids, is outgoing Work and Pensions Minister Andrew Smith, a man whose most remarkable political achievement so far is to have defied a wide range of hitherto unchallenged scientific theories by being even more boring than his stunningly boring name.

Unlike Mr Milburn, Mr Smith's ability to slip back into this cosily idealised family life is heavily hampered by the fact that, though he does have a 35-year-old stepson, he doesn't actually have any school-age children.

Don't know about you, but I smell a rodent or three. We live in strange times. In the old days, so we're told, politicians used to be interested in politics.

Back then, not only did some of them resign on principle but some of them even resigned in acknowledgement of their responsibilities for the actions of their civil servants. That must have been really weird.

Imagine what would happen now if, every time a Prime Minister sent thousands of his country's young men and women thousands of miles to fight an illegal war on the basis of desperately flawed evidence, he was forced to resign.

It would be amazing.

Maybe, if that happened, politicians would need a slightly better reason for starting wars that the alleged judgements of a non-existent deity.

Maybe then, those who didn't want to do their jobs properly wouldn't bother taking them in the first place and then it wouldn't matter whether or not they had families to spend more time with.