I mostly agree with the mostly positive assessments of Rachel Sylvester (The Times, 10 August 2010), James Forsyth (The Daily Mail, 8 August 2010) and Philip Stephens (The Financial Times, 6 August 2010). But I think they miss the “better government” downside. Not least (I tackle it last, below), there seems to be a frankness deficit.

The good news is that we have a man who looks and sounds like a PM and we have a coalition situation which has revitalised Cabinet government.

The bad is that 1oo days of feverish activity has produced a lot of mistakes, especially as there’s a fair degree of arrogance about. And there is room for serious doubt as to the quality – the structure - of our current government’s policy-making and its commitment to its much-vaunted “quiet effectiveness“.

Here’s a list of things which have gone badly, so far. In ascending importance:

(1) Big moment gaffe

I didn’t admire DC’s populism in dealing with the Moat suicide. Sure, DC was disparaging those who saw Moat as a hero. But a  Christian or  liberal gentleman is still required to see that Moat was sad and mad rather than obviously bad. One can’t withdraw compassion toward him as DC suggested.  

(2) Diplomatic gaffes

I can’t see the point of David Cameron’s picking Turkey as the place in which to diss Israel, or India to diss Pakistan. Doesn’t good diplomacy and good manners (even manliness) require that one says tough things to one’s host rather than one’s host’s enemy? Blaming the Scot Nats (even if it was a long-standing view) for the Al Magrahi debacle was cheap and un-neighbourly.

(3) Initiative Blizzard

Here’s a partial list of proposals which look to have been lobbed at the public to show liveliness: Turning off the children’s database; snatching the kiddies’ milk; binning ASBO’s; dishing the Film Council;  realigning Ambassadors as tradesmen; dishing Labour’s planning system; dissing Qangoes. This looks like the New Labour behaviour we were supposed to be abandoning.

(4)  Bungling big reforms

On schools, University fees, NHS reform, police reform, planning and benefits we have fundamental reform being tackled at (I admit) varying speeds and with (I admit) varying degrees of open-mindedness. None of it looks like process designed to get widespread intelligent buy-in. (The benefits reform is a special case: IDS has a sort of special dispensation, and anyway has coralled special cross-party support for his CSJ initiatives.)

(5) Decentralisation

There is a lot of rhetoric but very mixed evidence of power shifting downwards and outwards from the centre. The centre still bosses people about (hospitals have been told to get rid of mixed wards, for example).  Whitehall will fix how much money pupils get as they choose schools, and GPs get as they buy medical facilities. Local authorities aren’t being given revenue-rasing powers. We have yet to see whether taxpayers will stop blaming central government when their tax gets spent in ways they don’t like, and especially when Post Code Politics kicks in.

Various considerations lob up.

(a) Consultation

All of the new ideas (I think) are subject to a new process, “Structural Reform Plans”, which constitute some sort of road map. Some have been tackled by White Papers which are open to (sometimes very brief) consultation. Some have been subject to consultation papers which will then lead to White Papers. But none of it looks like a consensual process with professional “actors” and government working together.

(b) Politics

It is quite possible that the Government wants to achieve some big stuff and thinks doing it fast and early is the most effective route, allowing “shock and awe” to see it through, and allowing time for the reforms to settle and work before an election. This is a high-risk strategy, but whatever else it is, it isn’t frank, or necessarily steady.

(c) The fiscal squeeze 

The overall ambition of fiscal reform may provide a rationale for getting this stuff done fast, so that the fit between the new, straitened budget and the new, lean state can be clearer.  But these reforms do not necessarily save money; indeed the reverse is often the case. So it’s harder to see the immediate hurry.

(d) The government has not let us see the strategy or tactics in much of its approach to policy, and still less to process. They may think only wonks care, and there’s something in that. But if ministers are aiming at good government, they should be proud to say so and show how their approach to business (the mean not the ends) fit a specifically “better government” agenda. Otherwise, the public, the Archipelago State, and the professions, will feel bused and manipulated. That can’t be clever.

At this writing, 6000 people have looked at the piece on Number 10′s channel. It isn’t by any means the most popular of GB’s outing on YT. Several others have put him up there with Tony Blair’s ratings. He is said to look awful – hopelessly winsome and fulsome. It’s true, he does. But if you look at some other postings, he’s a revelation. Try this one on globalisation. (Here’s the text of it.) He’s funny and sharp and quite clever, just like his fans say he often is in private.

I say “quite clever”: I have looked briefly elsewhere at the evidence as to GB’s intellectuality.

In general, it’s important that politicians should post informal, short material on line. It’s one of the few arenas in which they stand a chance of reaching the young, and do it on their own terms – without the dreaded intermediation of the professional media cynics.

The YT announcement of the MPs’ expenses idea was horribly wrong of course. Let’s list the reasons.

(1) The young audience couldn’t be expected to know how this sort of initiative should not properly come from the PM at No 10. (It isn’t a government matter after all, and this audience were being misled that it might be.)

(2) Hot-foot announcements are the best way to convey the idea that an initiative has not been thought-through, debated, and made consensual. That’s to say: social media are precisely useless for the work GB chose to use them for that day.

(3) The social media are an elephant trap for leaders, from whom – in perception terms – we need dignity above all. YT is never obviously a good vehicle for dignity and is at least a testing one. That’s its downside.

(4) In a classic PR blunder, GB sets off talking uncontroversially and virtuously about how he’d like people to aspire to be MPs the way they aspire to be firemen. And then, having grabbed our attention as a mentor or a senior statesman, he uses the opportunity to play a political game. It’s a cheat.

Still, GB and the rest of us have much more to gain than lose by keeping the PM on YT.

Too typically, Sir Antony Jay trotted out the old nonsense that the Civil Service doesn’t want results, it wants its own comfort. (You can easily listen again to the item, 18/11/08, 08.45 am.) Denis McShane, who, to put it politely, is always as polite as he possibly can be, said that Yes Minister (Jay’s famous show) was documentary and pure fact.

Jay presented his case that the Civil Service exists to subvert democratically elected politicians.

He said ministers have to tell their ministries: “You’re not telling me what to do, I’m telling you what to do”, and they have to ask themselves, “Do you run the department or does the department run you?”

He went on to say that the Civil Service feel ministers come and go and it’s important to house train them. “The Civil Servant habit of thought is, ‘You don’t want ministers to achieve things, you want them to do what you want.’”

At times, he seemed to argue that the parties could be as bad as each other: “A lot of the time minsters and the Civil Service are in collusion, but sometimes in collision.” They he got back to the old mantra: When they did collide, he thought the minister must be right.

Denis McShane made a much more bluntly silly allegation: “The Civil Service represents the eternal interest of the British State and ministers operate, at least in theory, in the interest of the British people.” Perhaps aware that this was barmy stuff, he then said he admired the Civil Servants who had served him and are still there and care about the public interests. Obviously, he can’t have it both ways.

Of course, politicians and Civil Servants have different approaches and even different interests. The Civil Service may well be concerned to preserve the status quo.

What is forgotten, though, is that it is New Labour’s great failing that it wasted much of its tenure in dismantling the reforms which the Tories had introduced to public management. The Government then had to spend a lot of time reinstating those very reforms. To be honest, the Civil Service was rightly sceptical of the merit of New Labour’s behaviour in government, not least as the government subverted very valuable habits of government – such as having serious Cabinet meetings and a fairly coherent approach to policy.

This site is all about government and in part about the need for politicians to speak truthfully about their role in it. In the modern world, that requires us to unpick personality from policy and phoney perceptions from practical reality. That is why the fantasy premiership of Gordon Brown matters to MBG.

Here’s a good reminder from Sky TV of the unfolding Brown premiership

For a son of the manse, etc, Gordon Brown seemed and seems to have remarkably slight contact with the ordinary standards of truthfulness which in every breath he has told us to expect from him.

Put it this way: with Mr Blair, at least we knew we were getting a theatrical production. We knew what we were getting. Not so with Gordon Brown.

Here was a man who was spun as being above spin. More, he was its antithesis. He was sold as being strong on substance. The narrative his people wove was of a man whose reality was solid, intellectual and serious. He himself inaugurated his premiership as ushering in a new government, of strength and resolve.

The media, always suckers for a change and a narrative, lapped it up. 

For a few months, Gordon Brown was able to seem vaguely strong and silent during a series of crises (a bombing, some flooding and an animal disease outbreak) in which there was a well-oiled state response involving professionals who had no need of much from the Prime Minister. Looking solid was all that was required: a perception management issue.

These were duly spun as masterful performances. There soon followed a series of dents to this story. There were instant initiatives, a U-turn (the 10 percent tax fiasco), indecision (trailed and cancelled general election), prevarication.

We should only be as unkind as necessary. If GB was merely a clunky, unattractive man we could easly warm to him as born that way and so what. But he has allowed himself to be bullied into phoney smiles and an imitation of the touchy-feely which is especially creepy. He is a living embodiment of the wisdom of not pretending to be what one is not unless the performance comes naturally or can be convincing.

We should also remember that Brown has never acquired a reputation for the honesty he trumpets as being his hallmark.

As a dark horse, he need only have kept quiet and delivered solid achievement for others to big-up. But actually, he has always pumped out nonsense about himself and his works. 

Let’s begin with the whole “no more Tory boom and bust” thing. Boom and bust cycles were in much better shape in the last years of Tory government and Brown had only not to mess up that inheritance to have a decent economy. Ditto, independence for the Bank of England. John Major had inaugurated a new openness in the way the Bank’s committee issued its advice on inflation control – all any Chancellor had to do was follow that advice.

Thus leaves aside the deeper problem of whether the tripartite system for financial regulation which Gordon Brown invented has proved fit for purpose. 

In an ordinary politician this lack of frankness would be accepted as normal. But Mr Brown fashioned an image of himself as thriving on a higher standard of truthfulness.

As we were buffeted around in the credit crunch of September and October 2008, Brown repeatedly said that it was a crisis imported from the US. Indeed, it seemed that the UK economic downturn, led by a revaluation of the housing market, was going to be hidden under the US story. Had that worked, it would have been a truly dreadful case of deception.

Of course it won’t work. The degree to which the crisis in the UK financial world was to do with UK government policy will emerge, and Gordon Brown’s culpability with it.

There is plenty of blame to go round, but Gordon Brown won’t escape a share.  

Here’s a prediction. The UK plan which seems to be leading the world in framing what a rescue strategy might look like will emerge as the creation of clever Treasury officials and perhaps of Alistair Darling. Let’s hope Gordon Brown heaps praise on them.

As the plan was announced and huge quantities of tax-payer involvement were put into play, Gordon Brown still seemed to think it was him had worked a miracle. He claimed not so much the high ground as the craggy terrain of solidity:

For savers, for small businesses, and for home owners, we must in an uncertain and unstable world be the rock of stability on which the British people can depend.

This is the first financial crisis of the global age. In extraordinary times, our financial markets ceasing to work, the Government cannot just leave people to be buffeted about.

The next day two Times writers cast quite important doubt on Gordon Brown as The Rock. Peter Riddell, never unnecessarily brutal, said that Brown had a dangerous habit of avoiding any admission of vulnerability, not least in refusing to admit the country was in recession. Camilla Cavendish said she would have more faith in Brown’s claims to know how to regulate world finance if he had managed to regulate UK finances well.