A question of Cabinet control

knowing looks among Government back benchers and Parliamentary scribes.

Occasionally, a non answer can be spectacularly damaging and Mr Major

produced one of those yesterday. As all the Westminster world and Mr

Tony Blair knew, he had come from reading the riot act to his Cabinet

who, as again we all know, are famously divided on whether or not

Britain should ultimately sign up to a single European currency. Some of

them, moreover, we have heard airing their differences in public. This

had to stop, Mr Major told them.

Unfortunately, Mr Kenneth Clarke had just that morning delivered

himself in a newspaper interview of the view that he had a positive duty

to speak out on the longer term aspects of this vexed question. He is,

after all, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

With all this in mind, Mr Blair had prepared a simple question which

this column insists is the best kind. The Chancellor had denied that a

single currency was a threat to the nation state. Did the Prime Minister

agree?

Mr Major, like the girl in the old song, ''didn't say Yes and didn't

say No'', but: ''I think you would be wise not to misunderstand what the

Chancellor has said.''

The absence of a Yes or a No, or indeed of any positive statement, was

uncomfortably palpable. One could sympathise, though only up to a point.

A simple Yes would have had the Eurosceptics reaching for their guns; a

No would have distressed the Europhiles and also demonstrated that the

Cabinet was split.

Mr Major's reply also took the form of asking Mr Blair a question,

which he did last week as well. As it is Prime Ministers who answer

questions, this becomes akin to a pyschological transfer of power.

Mr Blair said he was ''delighted'' at this new habit and was perfectly

willing to move over to the Government's side of the chamber and answer

them once a week. Labour were delighted, the Tories appalled. Mr Major

made things worse by snappishly observing: ''You seem very keen to

answer questions. I wish some day you'd try it.'' Labour howled

delightedly: ''Now, Now.''

The Prime Minister meant, of course, that Mr Blair should answer his

rather ancient charge that the Labour leader had once been anti-EU but

it came out like an offer of the Treasury bench.

By the time Mr Major uttered the claim that the Cabinet was ''utterly

united'' he was sunk. Stymied, in fact, by his Chancellor sitting one

place away from him. For, in his interview, Mr Clarke had not minced his

words. The idea that a single currency was ''in itself'' some threat to

the nation state was ''wrong'' he said bluntly.

In an academic debate, Mr Major might have seized the words ''in

itself'' and argued that the circumstances in which one entered a single

currency were what counted and that, until you know the circumstances,

you cannot form a sensible view.

However, in a noisy chamber with the opposing factions in your party

and your Cabinet ready to fall on every word, Mr Major, even with

probably the best briefing staff in the Western World to help him, had

been unable to come up with a convincing form of words.

To have put the Prime Minister in that position Mr Clarke must reckon,

probably rightly, that his own position is ''unassailable''. Mr Major,

for his part, has made what must be a final effort to control his

Cabinet. If he fails, he is likely to be regarded in future as an

impotent spectator of a civil war he is powerless to stop.