Downing Street Says » Blair

Asked if the Prime Minister had mulled over the newspapers with the Chancellor the PMOS said that the Prime Minister had been getting on with business this morning. Yesterday he had said all he intended to say about the matter. Asked if the Prime Minister regarded trust between colleagues as a prerequisite the PMOS said that the Prime Minister was determined to get on with the business of Government because he believed that was what the people wanted him to do. Asked if the Prime Minister was saying that the account in the Sunday Telegraph was untrue the PMOS referred journalists to the Prime Minister’s words yesterday where he himself had referred to the answer he gave on the 26 September also on Breakfast with Frost. Asked if journalists were to say there had never been a denial of this story if this would be accurate the PMOS said that the Prime Minister had addressed the story on Frost on the 26 September. Asked why the Prime Minister did not just clear things up once and for all the PMOS said, as the Prime Minister had done so yesterday, that you had two choices in this, you either engaged in this sort of story or you did not. If you did you would end up spending all your time chasing these stories and not getting on with the business. He believed it was far more important to get on with the business.

Asked as a result of the recent trouble caused by two Ministers co-operating with books if the Prime Minister was going to give instructions to No10 not to co-operate with Andrew Rawnsley’s book the PMOS said the he had been anxious not to give the two published books that had been referred to any publicity and likewise he would not adopt the same approach with one that was not published. Asked if the Prime Minister was prepared to do anything disciplinarily about people talking to book authors the PMOS said he thought that in terms of people talking to journalists he imagined that they would be a lot more disappointed if people did not talk to them, but in terms of the impact such stories had everybody could read for themselves and draw their own conclusions. Asked what the Prime Minister thought the general public thought about these constant stories about bickering with the Chancellor the PMOS said that the Prime Minister thought that people wanted him to get on with the business, which was in fact what he was doing. Asked if the Prime Minister felt he needed to remind Cabinet colleagues about the confidentiality of discussions and correspondence between them or did he not care and was happy with the sound-bite suggested to "get on with business", the PMOS said that it was a fact that the Prime Minister was getting on with business. It was a fact if you looked back at what the Prime Minister had been doing both before and after Christmas that this was precisely what he had been doing, both in terms of policy abroad and at home. Therefore that was where he believed the Cabinet should focus its energies and that was what he intended to do. He had visited Iraq and the Middle East; the way in which the Government had responded as a whole to the Tsunami disaster and the next batch of 5 year plans coming up were representative of how this was a Government that was getting on with the business and therefore it was not meaningless to say it was focusing on that. The Government as a whole was in the same business and in terms of Africa and policy towards development, as this week and last week showed the Prime Minister and the Chancellor were in the same business.

2 Comments »

The PMOS (a civil servant) has been bloody well briefed on this basically political matter.
Comment by Gavin Whenman — 10 Jan 2005 on 9:46 pm | Link
It has always been easy to see the various PMOS over time slowly "going native". No difference here.
Comment by PapaLazzzaru — 12 Jan 2005 on 4:30 pm | Link

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» Monday, January 10, 2005

Blair – Brown

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