Steve Richards: What Blair can learn from Bush: more confidence, more holidays

A newspaper in the United States has calculated that since President Bush came to office he has spent 42 per cent of his time on holiday. That is an astonishing statistic, the cheeky precision of the percentage figure suggesting that the calculation is close to the truth. The newspaper did not hedge its bets by stating that the President had been enjoying leisurely pursuits for "around a third of his time in office". No, he has been having a ball for exactly 42 per cent of the hours that have passed under his regime.

In which case, what is much more astonishing is the amount of activity crammed in to the 58 per cent of the time that the President has spent away from his ranch. If he has been busy enjoying himself, he has also been enjoying himself during the odd moments when he has been busy.

What strikes a visitor to the USA, especially a visitor from the nervy politics of Britain, is the sheer brazen self-confidence of the new President. In a few months he has made more waves than Bill Clinton managed in his first few years in power. That is all the more remarkable given the context of Mr Bush's "victory" in the contest with Al Gore. There are still petitions being signed calling for another recount in Florida. At the very least, Mr Bush did not arrive in office with the unequivocal endorsement of the electorate.

You would not believe it by the way he is behaving. Mr Bush has attracted publicity here for his rejection of the Kyoto protocol – part of his wider principle that there is no point in signing "bad treaties" – and for his "son of Star Wars" project.

That hardly starts to scratch the surface. A letter-writer to this month's Vanity Fair shrieks breathlessly that he has "dismantled the Clean Air Act, undone the Safe Water Act, attacked the environment in Alaska, reduced the protection of public lands, cut the funding for abortion overseas and cut the funding on programmes aimed at reducing illiteracy".

But that gets us nowhere near the surface of his provocative productivity either. Mr Bush seems to be getting most of his legislation through Congress. That is not meant to happen. Most presidents come to office with trumpets blazing, only to discover that they cannot do very much. Regarded with awe by the rest of the world, they usually find that their heavily trailed initiatives are blocked by Congress and thrown into chaos. Mr Bush is bucking the trend.

Earlier this month he announced unexpectedly that he had reached an agreement on a thorny patients' rights bill. He had wanted strong limits on the legal action patients could take against insurance companies. The committee that had drafted the bill had firmly resisted. Mr Bush got his way. In the same week, his energy bill was passed, allowing for more drilling in an environmentally sensitive part of Alaska. And let us not forget that his substantial cut in income tax will start putting more money in people's pockets in the autumn.

Not bad for someone who is apparently on holiday nearly half the time. The vacations are a sign of self-confidence in themselves. At the moment he is away from it all in Texas, taking with him a horde of political journalists from Washington more used to following Clinton to Martha's Vineyard. In Texas the temperature rarely falls below 90F and there is not a great deal for the journalists to do. Reporters have started writing articles about how other reporters are coping with being in Texas for August. Mr Bush does not seem too bothered. He is enjoying himself on his ranch.

If Mr Clinton had come to power in such disputed circumstances, would he have dared to take a holiday in an unpopular location? Would he have dared to take a holiday at all? There would have been some agonising over it, a worry about how such ostentatious laziness might be perceived by voters who had not elected him.

Forget about the "what ifs". The contrast with Mr Clinton's early months in power is stark enough: Mr Bush tears up international treaties, cuts taxes and goes on never-ending holidays. In Mr Clinton's first year, his health service reforms fell apart, as did his plans to allow gays to join the military and, indeed, his entire tax and spending programme. In addition, he was so anxious about his relationship with the country's military leaders that he took advice on how to salute. That was after a triumphant landslide victory in 1992 – he was worried about saluting techniques.

In spite of all the accusations of prime-ministerial arrogance, the approach of early Blair (and possibly later Blair, too) has echoes of Clinton rather than Bush. After a huge landslide, Mr Blair paid homage to the previous Conservative government by sticking to its spending plans for two years. Some of his radical initiatives or embryonic initiatives disappeared as quickly as they were first raised: the ban on fox-hunting, the ban on tobacco advertising, plans for a fully reformed House of Lords, more power for local authorities. The British equivalent of George W Bush would have introduced all of these reforms in his first week and still have had time for a holiday in Tuscany.

Part of the self-confidence exuded by Mr Bush comes from his background. After all, he has been saluting all his life. But there is another, more worrying explanation. He strolled into power, crammed with ill-thought-through, reactionary ideas, and found that there was nothing left behind by Mr Clinton to make them harder to implement.

Mr Clinton signed the Kyoto protocol, but there were real doubts in the US and elsewhere whether his country would meet its environmental targets. Yes, Mr Clinton had attempted to develop a more outward-looking foreign policy, but it was so painstaking and erratic that no one was entirely sure what form it had taken. Yes, he had tried to help some of the worst-off with his welfare-to-work schemes, but not in any way that would challenge Mr Bush's moral right to cut taxes and public spending.

And who is to say that if Iain Duncan Smith became Prime Minister, a similar pattern would not follow? Mr Duncan Smith knows what he wants to do: cut taxes and spending, tear up EU treaties, never join the single currency and forge closer ties with the US. Next week, let us hope that British ministers return fresh from their holidays with some of Mr Bush's self-confidence. Otherwise it will not be too long before a right-wing prime minister is elected here, able to implement his destructive programme with an effortless aplomb.