Why Blair gave Birt the boot

Over the past few weeks, as ministers returned to their desks after their summer holidays, they noticed something different about their jobs. At first they couldn't put their finger on it: it is always more difficult to take note of an absence than a presence. But gradually it has sunk in. Lord Birt, former Director General of the BBC and now the Strategy Adviser to the Prime Minister, has not been about the place.

There have been no peremptory and, it must be said, rather pompous messages from his Lordship or, more usually, his PA. There have been no schemes to change the way the country is run. Nutty ideas have not descended from Downing Street, nominally from the Prime Minister, but in practice with the paws of Lord Birt all over them.

"It's been radio silence on the Birt front," mutters one Whitehall adviser. "He's been done in," says another well- informed figure, demanding confidentiality as he does so. "Done in very nicely but done in all the same. He's been kicked upstairs."

Downing Street itself denies this. When I spoke to No 10 this morning, I asked whether the Liverpudlian peer, who made his reputation at Granada TV before moving to the BBC, was on the premises. "I have absolutely no idea," came the answer. The official divulged that Birt still gloried in the title of Strategy Adviser to the Prime Minister. "Oh, so that means that he runs the Strategy Unit then?" "No," wearily replied the official, "he works alongside the Strategy Unit in various ways." And does he have an office? " Some accommodation is made available for him," asserted the Downing Street official.

The truth of the matter is that the Strategy Unit is run by Geoff Mulgan, a man who is said not to find Lord Birt's presence congenial or his ideas interesting. Birt has fought and lost a battle for power and influence within Downing Street. Whether or not Lord Birt is physically present in Downing Street - a matter which, this morning's conversation notwithstanding, remains mysterious - his personal authority seems to have been eclipsed.

This will be a source of regret in very few places. In broadcasting circles and the BBC in particular the schadenfreude will be widely shared. The New Statesman magazine, in a recent article, proclaimed that "as director general of the BBC, John Birt became the most detested public figure of his generation". This may have been putting things a little strongly and overlooks the competing claims of Michael Howard as Home Secretary, and the hapless Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont. Nevertheless, Birt did achieve the improbable feat of making his successor, Greg Dyke, seem a sweetmannered and benign individual.

But this is trivia. The views of disaffected BBC executives and others on the subject-of John Birt are of no consequence. What does matter is what his effective demise tells us about the way Britain is governed. For his abrupt loss of influence marks the moment when Tony Blair effectively abandoned an experiment on topdown, Napoleonic rule and went back to something more traditional, decentralised and respectful of the British parliamentary tradition. The sidelining of Lord Birt is, in short, the moment when Mr Blair finally came to his senses.

With his suits, his glasses, and intolerant, bossy manner, Lord Birt was the ultimate-symbol of central management control. Mr Blair, for some reason, goes weak at the knees when he comes across such figures. He brought in David Simon, the chairman of the giant BP oil company in to central government. Keith Hellawell, the doomed drugs czar was another. Blair was attracted to supposedly competent technocrats like Birt and Simon because he had no faith in either the civil service and an abiding disdain for Cabinet colleagues. Throughout the first term of government, the Prime Minister never let go of the levers of power and refused to allow ministers to act on their own volition. He insisted that they report instead to unaccountable, unelected figures in Downing Street like Birt or Simon.

It was a system that was never going to work. It bears a large amount of the responsibility for the catastrophic failure of the first five years of New Labour to get to grips with public service reform. But Tony Blair, in the face of all the evidence, persevered with it and importing Lord Birt into Downing Street after his doubtfully successful time at the BBC (among his dubious achievements was the ruining of the flagship Panorama current affairs programme in a move doubtless welcomed by No 10) was the last attempt to make this Napoleonic system work.

But Birt's arrival coincided with the first mutinous uprising against it of ministers who had earlier been too cowed to complain. Even Stephen Byers, whose entire political career was based on sucking up to the Blairite centre, expressed his rancour against Lord Birt's role as a No 10- based transpor t supremo. And when Byers was ousted and replaced by Alastair Darling, matters got worse. Darling's single most notable political characteristic is caution. But when Lord Birt came up with a plan for a new network of toll-funded motorways across the length and breadth of the British Isles, Darling exploded. He made it known that he would have nothing to do with the Birt plan.

From that moment on Lord Birt was struggling for living space. He became the victim of a Cabinet ministers' revolt against Downing Street. Today he may or may not be hard at work in No 10. But his presence is less important than the most junior secretary in the typing pool. And the eclipse of the once mighty Birt tells us that the Blair government has moved on towards a new area and a new system. A system where ministers and officials can breathe more freely.