Bagehot: A Blunkett judgment

摘要

What finished off David Blunkett was that he had exhausted the good will and personal sympathy both of cabinet colleagues and the bulk of Labour mps. Despite the prime minister's insistence on Wednesday that Mr Blunkett had left the government "with no stain of impropriety" and that he could have carried on, even Mr Blair's patience with the work and pensions secretary must have been wearing thin. Mr Blunkett's disdain for the ministerial code of conduct and willingness to take on a potentially lucrative two-week directorship at an obscure DNA-testing company confirmed what many people had already begun to think: that the turmoil and disappointment in his personal life had fatally eroded his once-sound judgment (see page 34). He was thus no longer in a position to sponsor the radical green paper on welfare reform that Mr Blair had been pressing for. To judge by his frantic attempts to get Number 10 to go easy on making draconian changes to the incapacity-benefit rules, Mr Blunkett suspected as much himself even before last weekend's revelations.