Alan Watkins: Spin cannot change the weather

Recent experience of this country's politics, for what it is worth, teaches us that a change in the weather takes place every 15 or 20 years. It was so with the elections of 1945, 1964, 1979 and, yes, 1997. People waved little Union Jack flags outside No 10, and it was a bright May morning. Even Mr Alastair Campbell could not control the weather, but he did supply both the flags and the cast of extras, who had been conscripted predominantly from the staff of Labour Party headquarters.

In a West End theatre, a better-heeled audience knowingly applauded the references to a discredited government led by Winston Churchill and the new Labour administration of C R Attlee. The play was about the Potsdam conference just after the war. Goodness knows what the audience made of it all. But in a restrained way, they cheered the arrival of Mr Tony Blair.

Mr Blair, we were told – and many people believed him – was going to clear up the mess. The greatest propaganda coup of Mr Blair's period of opposition before 1997 was to convince the electorate that the Major government was corrupt. I do not blame Sir John (as he later became) but the press officer who persuaded the journalists after that speech was about sexual morality. This was at the party conference of 1993.

It was chiefly about reading, writing and arithmetic, and what were alleged to be the declining standards in those improving activities. It became known as the "back to basics" speech, and it had nothing to do with sexual intercourse. But apart from a few close readers, people chose to regard the Prime Minister's performance as a call to order among Conservative MPs and even ministers.

In the early years of Sir John's tenure, there were a couple of tiny scandals, hardly worth bothering with. These blossomed out into the "cash for questions" cases of mid-term. Far from sitting idly by, the Conservative government proceeded to busy itself with bodies of varying descriptions. A new committee on standards and privileges, a parliamentary commissioner, another chieftain on standards in public life: it was difficult to keep up. Indeed, few did, except for those who duty or recreation it was to consult obscure works of reference.

By the time Mr Blair took office, the principle committees and their judges or administrators were all in place. Mr Jack Straw's lengthy Elections and Referendums Act, which he supervised as home secretary, was virtually all that remained to be done in this line of business.

Even so, Mr Blair claimed to come to office with the aspiration of being purer than pure or whiter than the latest washing powder showing two young women engaged in animated conversation in a kitchen. In advertising, as in politics, the old tunes are the best tunes.

Almost immediately, Mr Blair became involved in the Bernie Ecclestone affair. Its details need not detain us, though I remember them quite well. It involved cigarette advertising on television in motor racing; a somewhat murky role for Ms Tessa Jowell; and Mr Blair appearing on television to assure the viewers that he was a pretty straight sort of a guy.

So it went on, culminating in the Iraq war, with many other episodes of a similar (though admittedly less catastrophic) nature occurring in the

intervening period and since then. It has been left to Mr Gordon Brown to deal with the consequences.

The form of this last sentence, the way it is cast, seems to imply that what has happened is somehow not Mr Brown's fault. But it is, Gordon, it is, from the very beginning of the New Labour project, as it came to be called. Politicians are now held in lower esteem than they were when Labour came to office in 1997.

Naturally, we must be on our guard against romanticising the past. Just as the British public is periodically engulfed by a fit of morality, so is it convinced that its politicians are up to no good. The peasants of the 15th century were probably saying at the time of the Wars of the Roses: "Lancaster? York? What's the difference? They're both the same. They're all in it for what they can get out of it."

In the case of Ms Jacqui Smith, the present government and the entire political class have got off lightly. Case dismissed without a stain on her character. It began when it became known that the Home Secretary was claiming as her principal residence a bedroom (or it may have been a bedsitting room) at her sister's house in south London. At the same time, she was claiming allowances for her large house in her constituency, Redditch. And she was employing her husband as her constituency secretary, while he was renting questionable films at the public expense.

Defending Ms Smith, her husband, or both of them, a woman columnist denounced the attacks on the home secretary as "the New Puritanism". I do not know about that. For myself, I have always been prepared to make do with the Eurosport channel on the hotel television, but that is by the way. Puritanism, new or old, has nothing to do with it. It is a matter of setting standards, observing them, and enforcing them.

All the comments I have read from ministers and members alike are that they sedulously followed the rules. In that case, the rules are wrong and ought to be changed, in particular those concerning primary or secondary residences and enough household goods to equip a married couple setting up in life, assuming they can get hold of somewhere to live in the first place. The Parliamentary Commissioner says that the rules can be and will be changed, but that it will all take time.

Mr Brown has told him, in his usual peremptory and somewhat uncivil fashion, to hurry up. Mr Nick Clegg tells us that the whole matter could be resolved in weeks with a few meetings involving himself, Mr David Cameron and Mr Brown. I am not so sure about that.

Mr Cameron has put his toe in the water but has yet to engage with any great force with the current of public opinion. The standard explanation is that Mr Cameron has had troubles of his own in his party, with the affair of Mr Derek Conway and his relations, and perhaps others, and that he does not want to add to his worries.

The simpler explanation is that Mr Cameron does not have to do anything. The tide is against Mr Brown, just as it was against the Conservative government 12 years ago.

And yet, there is a difference. There were those who expected a new age to come about. It was foolish of them, I agree – I never expected it to happen – but that was what a lot of people thought at the time. It was a case of new men and old measures: targets and announcements.

The measures were inaugurated by Margaret Thatcher and Sir Geoffrey Howe and continued by a succession of Conservative politicians, culminating in Mr Blair and Mr Brown. We are indeed at the beginning of a new age. But it came about in 2008, or I would say, 2007, rather than with the election which Mr Brown will shortly call, perhaps sooner than we think.