The Goliath that smote David

Nick Morrison looks at how the fall-out from the Home Secretary's resignation has left a stain on the Blair Government.

When David Blunkett was forced from office, Tony Blair wrote to reassure his departing Home Secretary that: "You leave government with your integrity intact". Yesterday's report into the affair of the ex-lover's nanny's visa shows it was a somewhat reckless remark from the Prime Minister.

Contrary to Mr Blunkett's original assertion that he had played no part in speeding up the visa application, the report by Sir Alan Budd found that he was linked, by a "chain of events", into the processing of the visa in 52 days, 120 days faster than the average.

It must have made unhappy, if not entirely unexpected, reading for the Prime Minister, as he returned from a well-timed visit to Iraq last night. But his comment on his former Cabinet colleague's integrity was not the first of his rash forays on the subject.

Even as his ministers were castigating the Tories for calling for Mr Blunkett's departure when the inquiry was initially announced, Mr Blair saw no contradiction in announcing he was confident that the Home Secretary would be exonerated.

But the PM's eagerness to jump to conclusions can be understood, even if not excused, in the light of the role Mr Blunkett played in the New Labour government.

This goes far beyond being one of the few political heavyweights able to stand up to Chancellor Gordon Brown, and one of the Prime Minister's handful of reliable allies in Cabinet. It is much more than his status as a left-winger who bought into the New Labour project, a position which has anyway been largely eroded by his behaviour in office. And any equal opportunity brownie points from having a blind man in the Cabinet have long since become irrelevant.

What Mr Blunkett brings to the party is much more than this. He is the Prime Minister's connection to a large chunk of the electorate. The two men may be ideologically close, but while one is a middle-class Islingtonian with little empathy with ordinary voters, the other is working class Yorkshire, who has lived the life and has the scars to prove it.

Mr Blunkett has the ability not only to speak to voters in the language of the pub and the street, but to articulate many of their concerns. He may have dismayed the legal establishment and the liberal wing of his party, but his pronouncements on asylum and immigration, on criminals and prisons, and on the police and the courts, undoubtedly struck a chord.

It is not without reason that a significant majority of the public wants him to return to government after the next General Election, according to a poll published yesterday.

His ability to overcome hardships, not just his blindness, but also his father's death in an industrial accident and the family's battle for compensation, and his dedication to his job and prodigious capacity for work, have made him a respected and admired, if not always loved, figure.

It is an image which seems to have been improved by the revelation of his affair with Kimberly Quinn, giving a human and compassionate side to a man considered so dour that appearing out on the town with a glamorous woman did not even raise an eyebrow.

But as much of a blow as his departure from Government was the manner of his leaving, laid bare in yesterday's Budd report.

It may once have seemed far-fetched that a member of the last Conservative government could have the effrontery to accuse anyone else of sleaze, but that is precisely what happened yesterday, when Opposition leader Michael Howard accused Mr Blair of leading a "grubby" government.

And while the Prime Minister's spokesman may have insisted that the report drew a line under the affair, its failure to resolve some of the key issues means it will still rumble on.

Although Sir Alan found a chain of events linking Mr Blunkett to the decision to fast-track the visa application, he was unable to unearth evidence that the Home Secretary had personally given such an order.

A fax from Mr Blunkett's private office to the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND), responsible for processing visas, has unaccountably vanished, and Mr Blunkett's memory, normally awesome, has let him down on his recall of key events. His supporters may attribute this to the exceptional emotional stress Mr Blunkett has been under, but it will be difficult to dispel the notion that Sir Alan has been unable to get to the bottom of the issue. The Opposition demand for a full inquiry, headed by a judge and with the power to take evidence under oath, may not be realised, but it does mean the Tories can prolong the Government's agony a little longer.

For it now seems, again perhaps incredibly in view of their own record, that the Conservatives intend to make trust a key issue of the next election campaign.

But from the Bernie Ecclestone affair at the very start of Mr Blair's first government, when Labour returned a £1m donation to the Formula One boss amid suggestions ministers had been influenced in exempting the sport from the ban on tobacco advertising, to the mass deception over the war in Iraq, it is now clear that trust in the Government is fragile indeed. Mr Blair may have come to office promising to be "whiter than white", but in the light of the last seven years this seems a very hollow promise.

It may be the same arrogance which afflicted John Major's administration, the belief that they are untouchable, which has now seeped into its successor. The same arrogance which led Mr Blunkett to believe he would survive and which prompted the Prime Minister to insist his Home Secretary would be exonerated, and that his integrity is intact, despite an inquiry finding to the contrary; a belief that, however great the misdemeanour, they will get away with it.

It may be that by talking of sleaze, the Conservatives merely serve to remind the voters of what has gone before, but it is surely a mark of how far we have come that Mr Howard can talk of a "grubby government, low on integrity, light on honesty and lacking in all humility" and keep a straight face.