A number of people uninterested in the finer points of the ministerial holiday rota have asked me this week what is going to happen when John Prescott is in charge of the country.
I guess we will struggle on somehow.
Mr Prescott will neither single-handedly move our troops from Iraq to Iran with an unfortunate slip of his wayward tongue, nor approve a Wild Westthemed casino in a conservation area while the boss is off and Parliament is in recess.
The worst that can probably befall us is an outbreak of malapropism and bad temper with journalists. In the event of any real national disaster, the emergency planning springs into action and responsible ministers hasten home.
The real task of a stand-in PM is to cope with sudden firefights by putting up a solid front against critics and not allowing small stories to catch the Government on the back foot.
One catch: Mr Prescott is no longer trusted by the Prime Minister and his team to fulfil this role.
What also worries Labour strategists and ministers is the inability to put to rest the spring turbulence which saw the Loanations scandal, Mr Prescott’s office adultery exposed, the Health Secretary jeered by nurses – and poor May elections followed by a reshuffle which destabilised the jittery Blair-Brown balance and sparked the formerly loyal Charles Clarke into a seething attack on Mr Blair’s leadership.
Any hopes of returning to a “steady state” have been frustrated. As one insider puts it: “We’re unlikely to be popular at this point, but Tony can live with that. People are more rattled by the sense that there is no calm returning at the heart of government.”
The news that Mr Prescott now faces a sleaze inquiry into gifts received on his US visit to Dome-owner Philip Anschutz is another sign of his slide from powerbroker to liability.
There is no longer a “go-between” function to perform between Mr Blair and Mr Brown. That channel has moved to a semi-official Alastair Campbell-Ed Balls axis. Clamped fiercely to nominal office, Prescott has no real role in government, nor in the PM’s inner circle.
Mr Blair is, however, reluctant to face another round of upheaval and agitation from the back benches masquerading as support for “JP” before party conference. (I notice that Number 10 no longer fondly uses these initials to describe the travails of the deputy PM.
Now he is referred to privately as “the Prescott problem”.) An ingenious solution has been found.
“We’re not exactly moving him,” says one party source planning the summer cover. “We’re just diluting him.”
While Mr Prescott is nominally running the country, expect to see (and hear) little of him and rather more of less accident-prone Blairites.
In particular, the new party chairwoman, Hazel Blears, will be prominent for a good chunk of Mr Blair’s August time off. She is deemed to be the natural replacement for Mr Prescott in handling-difficult issues, from party unrest to the Afghanistan deployment, in the media.
Chief whip Jacqui Smith will also appear more often, as will the Environment Secretary and Mr Blair’s favourite “mini-me”, David Miliband.
As for the “deputy” prime minister, he will be “having regular meetings and undertaking a range of visits”, I am told, which makes him sound like an obscure minor royal. “He will be focused on government,” adds (yet) another summer holiday organiser.
Arrangements for this period have been “prepared earlier and more thoroughly” than in previous years. There will be “high-quality cover” for all eventualities. After last week’s disastrous Today programme outing, a large sign might as well have been hung up in Number 10 saying: “Please do not let JP near a microphone for the duration of my absence. Thank you. TB.”
Mrs Blears is the major beneficiary of this period of power devolution. “We always wanted more Cabinet government and shared responsibility,” jokes one minister, “Well, finally, we’re going to get it.”
Being, as one colleague ungallantly puts it, “short, ginger and underrated”, Mrs Blears may look like a sales manager in a provincial Marks & Spencer’s.
She has, however, shown herself as one of the few outstanding successes of the late Blair period, sailing through the dysfunctional Home Office and remaining loyal to David Blunkett without reaping damage.
In May, she inherited the chairmanship from the gauche Ian McCartney (a Prescott appointment) and with it a party organisation in disarray over a messy funding scandal. Since then, she has applied what Labour has so obviously lacked since the reshuffle – a calm and steady hand even under duress. Opposed by Gordon Brown as party chairman in the May reshuffle – he wanted his own loyalist, Douglas Alexander, in that post – Mr Blair insisted she should do the job, not least because she is managing the run-up to a conference critical to the PM’s hopes of surviving in Downing Street.
In a party now irretrievably riven with factions, she is disliked by few.
And as one of the few genuinely workingclass Blairites (she was the first in her family to go to university), she is well placed to read the riot act to stroppy backbenchers on the line between argument and what she ominously calls “betrayal territory”. Her allies regard her role in the next weeks as a “dry run” for a possible candidacy for deputy leader in the future.
She also has a fearlessness that too many well-behaved female Blairites have lacked. Among senior women, she has been the only minister to take the “Prescott problem” head on where others have ducked: “When you are in a leadership position, people expect you to set a good example.”
I could not honestly say that Mrs Blears is profound; she really does treat every political argument as if it were a quarrelsome customer fairly asking for money back. But neither is she shrill, unreasonable or afraid of confronting the facts.
“Yes, it has been a tough few weeks,” she is apt to remark when the latest political plague of frogs has just descended. Or, memorably, after the crushing defeat in Gwent: “This is what we would expect at this point in the cycle.” There is no humiliation, defeat or internal treachery the doughty Mrs Blears would not cheerfully claim to expect as the norm.
Given the lurching drama Mr Blair’s long goodbye has become, that is probably the wisest course to follow, even in the summertime.
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