The tragedy of Mr Byers, a decent minister who became a laughing stock

The architects of New Labour used to worry that Old Labour politicians could never be trusted in front of a camera or behind a microphone, but the casualties of this Government have nearly always been those who prided themselves on being media-friendly: Peter Mandelson, who has resigned twice, Charlie Whelan and Harriet Harman. Now Stephen Byers is the latest Blairite to fall largely because of his obsession with presentation and the media.

Step back from the frenzy surrounding Mr Byers and the charge sheet in practical terms is fairly limited. Transport specialists from across the political spectrum including some senior Tories regarded him fairly highly. They praised him for putting together the strategy for the railways. Even the Strategic Rail Authority had a strategy under Mr Byers, which is quite a novelty. None of the transport experts I contacted during a recent Byers frenzy at Westminster thought he should resign, but virtually all of them assumed he would be gone by the summer. This is what tends to happen to secretaries of state for transport in this Government. On average, there has been at least one a year since 1997.

Mr Byers had contrived to get himself into a much worse position than any of his predecessors from that doomed department. While his predecessors got blamed for the terrible state of transport, Mr Byers found himself blamed for virtually everything that went wrong in the entire country. Many attacks were misplaced.

Last weekend's report from the Transport Select Committee is a case in point. Rightly the committee was highly critical of the Government's timid Ten-Year Plan, a plan that will do little more than increase congestion on the roads. But the minister responsible for the plan was John Prescott rather than Mr Byers. It was Mr Prescott who spent four years running on the spot, intervening and not intervening, threatening the railway companies and being conciliatory to the railway companies. Mr Byers had a few months to pick up the pieces and was almost doing so. Yet the headlines on the Transport Select Committee report suggested it was all his fault.

It was almost inevitable, therefore, that Mr Byers would find himself at the centre of the row over Dirty Desmond and his donation to the Labour Party – inevitable in that Mr Byers was at the centre of every controversy. But again there was no evidence that Mr Byers had acted wrongly in allowing Richard Desmond to acquire the ownership of Express Newspapers (an ownership granted before Mr Desmond handed over a large donation).

Most bizarrely of all, Mr Byers got caught up in a row over the euro two weeks ago. Again he did nothing wrong. Speaking off the record to some lobby correspondents he stated the obvious, that it might be necessary to have the option of introducing a Referendum Bill in the next Parliamentary session. It was the sort of hypothetical conversation that many ministers can be drawn into on the basis that correspondents do not rush off and reveal their identity. Correspondents are always calling on ministers to resign. Perhaps the correspondents who revealed Mr Byers' identity on that occasion should also consider their positions. Was it anyway such a big story?

So Mr Byers was a better Transport Secretary than John Prescott. He behaved according to the rules when it came to the ownership of Express Newspapers and was not guilty of putting his foot into the Government's euro policy. Instead he was brought down by spin and his spin doctor.

He should have realised on entering the Department of Transport last June that voters would decide for themselves whether transport was improving. What was especially shocking about Jo Moore's infamous memo was that she wanted to "bury'' bad news at all, as if travellers would not notice how grim it was out there if some official figures were hidden away. That style of news management should have been buried when Labour got into power in 1997.

His second mistake was his decision not to be candid about his role in the departure of Martin Sixsmith, his former director of communications. No one would have been shocked to discover that he had been involved in Mr Sixsmith's departure. Yet he chose to pretend to Jonathan Dimbleby that this was not the case; a trivial lie over a trivial personnel matter.

He also got into a terrible mess over the decision to take Railtrack into administration. This was largely because the policy, highly complex and risky, was devised in the Treasury. He would never have dared to instigate such a policy on his own. Ever since there have been allegations that he gave different versions of the plans for Railtrack to different groups in advance of the announcement. Then, when the announcement was made, Mr Byers was unavailable for comment, hiding from the media because of the Jo Moore affair.

The media's obsession with Mr Byers and Mr Byers' ineptitude in dealing with the media meant that he had lost credibility and the will to carry on. Could anyone cope for very long reading headlines every day stating that he was a liar? In my view the media has overstated Mr Byers' misdemeanours, but it is so powerful it can reduce a minister to fatal ridicule without trying very hard. Once in such a position a minister becomes a laughing stock.

There are significant lessons from this for the Government. The first is the importance of getting an established heavyweight into the Transport Department (preferably breaking off all other responsibilities in that overburdened department – Mr Byers was also responsible for local government and housing, two other massive policy areas). It does not matter who the heavyweight is as long as he or she stays in that post for several years. Mr Byers was in the middle of some hugely complicated negotiations about the future of the Underground and the body to replace Railtrack. What a shame that it is probably too late for a successor to change the policy on the Underground – a policy that is more damaging than any of Mr Byers' offences and will probably be the cause of the resignation of the next Transport Secretary in a year's time.

The successor also needs to be strong enough occasionally to challenge dicta from Downing Street and the Treasury. Transport policy is too important to be run by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor alone. They have other matters on their mind. Mr Prescott's big mistake was always to give in to the Downing Street policy unit, a body that did not recognise the scale of the crisis in transport until it was almost too late to do anything about it. Mr Byers was bossed about more by the Treasury, which gave him no option other than to stick to the PPP for the Underground and which devised the new plans for taking Railtrack into administration.

The final lesson is that whoever takes over at the Transport Department should get on with the job and not worry too much about presentation. In this government, those who think they understand the media tend to be brought down by it.

s.richards@independent.co.uk