'Control freak' Blair savaged

Lord Butler today launches a scathing attack on Tony Blair's "bad" style of governing.

The former Cabinet Secretary says the Prime Minister is too concerned with "selling, central control and headlines".

Lord Butler, who led the inquiry into Iraq intelligence, says Mr Blair's style allows too little "reasoned deliberation" and provides "insufficient opportunities for other people to debate, dissent and modify". The unusually strong criticism from a former head of the civil service comes in his first full interview since his report was published in July.

Lord Butler tells Boris Johnson, editor of The Spectator, that Parliament's "shameful" inability to control the executive left the Government "much too free to bring in a huge number of extremely bad Bills, a huge amount of regulation, and do really whatever it likes". He adds: "And whatever it likes is what will get the best headlines tomorrow. All that is part of what is bad government in this country."

Lord Butler says the Blair administration "reaches conclusions in rather small groups of people who are not necessarily representative of all the groups of interests in government". His views are especially damaging because he was Mr Blair's top official for eight months, from the 1997 election until his retirement in 1998, and witnessed the Prime Minister's management style at close quarters.

They will be seized on by opponents of Mr Blair's socalled "den-ocracy," in which key decisions have been taken by handfuls of political appointees in off the record chats in the Prime Minister's Downing Street study.

The Butler Inquiry into the handling of intelligence on Iraq criticised the "informality and circumscribed character" of the Government's decisionmaking.

But in his interview he goes much further. He says: "Britain is worse governed for the fact that the executive has got so free of any inhibition imposed by Parliament or the public.

"There is too much emphasis on selling, there is too much central control and there is too little of what I would describe as reasoned debate which brings in all the arguments."

Lord Butler also describes the Government's decision to go to war as a "gamble" but refuses to go much further than he already has done in criticising the dossier which claimed Iraq could launch a WMD attack in 45 minutes.

The Butler report said that "more weight was placed on the intelligence than it would bear" and attacked as a "serious weakness" the way in which vital caveats about the thinness of the evidence were dropped from the dossier.

Asked why he thought those caveats had been left out, Lord Butler tells Johnson: "One has got to remember what the purpose of the dossier was. The purpose was to persuade the UN and the British people why the Government thought Iraq was a very serious threat." Including the caveats "would have weakened" that purpose, Lord Butler says.

Lord Butler says he was mostly pleased with reactions to his report, but was "not very happy" at the accusations by some that it was a Hutton-style whitewash into the death of weapons expert David Kelly.

The most difficult thing, he said, was when "I got letters from people saying they had lost a son [in Iraq], saying, 'You say there were faults in the Government's presentation of the evidence, but nobody in the Government is paying any price for it'.

"Those are the most emotionally (difficult) ... one felt for the people who'd lost people... and the human desire that a head should roll."