Blair fires broadside of flagship Bills (Pub-friendly) [The Rockall Times]

The spectacular rollercoaster ride that Tony Blair promised the British people in the heroic third term as a reward for their loyalty at the ballot-box has officially begun, and it could prove to be even more exciting than the recent adventures in Iraq. After two practice attempts at compiling a decent legacy, obstructed by the forces of conservatism to begin with and then distracted by the lure of the international stage, the Prime Minister is all too aware that time is running out, and he's risen to the challenge superbly, surrounding himself with another fantastic team of advisors at Number 10. Together they came up with a blistering barrage of forty-five flagship Bills, as announced in the Queen's speech at the Palace of Westminster on Tuesday.

The sheer amount of legislation in store came as no surprise to those with their ear to the ground, and neither did most of the content. As the Prime Minister reminded the assembled throng in his summing-up after the reading, there are now hundreds of intimidating gangs of loutish, disrespectful teenagers spilling out of the run-down streets and housing estates where up until now they've been content to terrorise the underclass with minimal effect on the mainstream economy. That's not good enough for them any more it seems — they've now taken to running amok in some of the better High Streets and out-of-town shopping malls in the Midlands and South East, posing a serious threat to the consumer confidence on which so much of the government's success is built.

"Frankly, I can't be expected to bring up all of your children with my own two hands," Mr Blair told the nation, but he could lessen the impact of that disappointment by giving us the next best thing — hundreds of helpful precepts and regulations backed up by the full force of the law that will make sure we all keep on the straight and narrow and set a fantastic example to our young people from now on.

Yet it was the exquisite packaging of the measures — an inspired coherence that made it into something so much more than the sum of its parts — which confounded the Prime Minister's fiercest critics within his own party and caused his admirers to pop open the champagne. The word had got round that a "relentlessly New Labour programme" was about to be unveiled, provoking the usual suspects to mutter darkly and gather together in smoke-filled rooms reeking with the stench of bankrupt Socialist ideals to plan the counter-attack — a series of back-bench rebellions that would scupper one Bill after another, destroying the last vestiges of Mr Blair's diminished authority and signalling the end of the road for the New Labour project itself.

As the Queen lay recovering under the smelling salts after stoically working her way through the interminable list of worthy government initiatives the Prime Minister reiterated for the benefit of those who were still pinching and slapping themselves into wakefulness what it was all about. "This is the mandate we've been elected on," he stressed. "A radical, far-reaching programme of modernising reforms that is quintessentially New Labour."

In the subsequent debate the Tory and Lib Dem leaders each had their turn at pouring scorn on the government's agenda, but to little account. It was the spokesman for the rebel Labour faction, the rebarbative Alan Simpson, member for Nottingham South, whose speech was awaited with excitement and trepidation in equal measure. It was his response that could seal the fate of the forty-five Bills, holding as he did the balance of power in his hands.

"I'd like to congratulate the Prime Minister," the cocksure rebel leader began, as the front bench sat grim-faced, waiting for the inevitable sarcastic twist — "on beginning to see things our way, and not before time. If he'd stuck to the unremittingly, uncompromisingly New Labour programme he was threatening last week we'd have killed it stone dead. As it is, we're prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, for the time being at least."

"Hear hear!" several of the rebel contingent called out.

"Which one among us," Simpson continued, "with hand on heart can honestly say they don't like the sound of a quintessentially New Labour programme, or a quintessentially anything for that matter? Come on, hands up!" he turned to face his supporters and challenged them to defy his authority. The rows of normally combative MPs sat docile, in full agreement with their champion's understandable change of tune.

Satisfied, Simpson turned to address the New Labour front bench. "Just keep on with that programme as read out by the good lady — no more rabbits out of the hat, mind — and you shouldn't see much trouble from us lot this term. It's a bloody good word that — quintessentially. I don't know what it means but I like it," he concluded, and resumed his seat to unified Labour applause.

As Mr Blair received well-earned pats on the back from relieved Cabinet colleagues marvelling at yet another example of the verbal wizardry that had won them a vital few months of obsequious deference in their passionate drive for reform, his opposite numbers Howard and Kennedy sat glum-faced, proven once again to be out of tune with the popular mood, failing to spot a trend before it was too late, their ungracious earlier contributions leaving a poor taste in the mouth and exposing them both as the irrelevant has-beens they most assuredly now are.

Blair fires broadside of flagship Bills

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