Call me unfashionable, but Harriet deserves an even break

WHO'S UP? Who's down? The great, burning question of British political gossip since records began, fills the pages of every diarist from Chips Channon through Dick Crossman to Alan Clark. The basis for the answer is something intangible, a combination of the press coverage minister X gets, the last thing anyone heard, or says they heard, the Prime Minister remark about him or her, some wispy, inexplicable sense the colleagues have of whether promotion, demotion or a sideways move beckons.

Judged by such deeply unscientific criteria, Harriet Harman isn't exactly up. The latest charge against her is that she has been leaking budget information - a charge which can be levelled more widely than at Ms Harman. The Treasury itself has adopted a rather more flexible attitude to budget purdah than in the past. Last week, two reports did indeed appear about budget provisions which she must have known about, since they affected her own departmental responsibilities.

The first affected lone parents, subject of the government's most outstanding presentational and political debacle to date. It said that the child premium on income support would be increased by a level high enough to offset the cuts in lone parents' benefit forced through a deeply reluctant House of Commons late last year. This was an entirely welcome boost for poor lone parents but one which also kept intact the principle that henceforth the same child benefit would be paid to lone parents as to married couples. The second said that there would be a big increase in child care support for those earning less than around pounds 20,000 a year - on a bigger scale than expected and possibly worth as much as pounds 1bn. This was also welcome, not least to this newspaper which has been campaigning for an increase in child care support. Ms Harman was not, it is pretty clear after detailed enquiries, the source of the first report. She certainly appears to have talked in general terms to journalists about plans to boost child care - including openly in front of the Select Committee last Wednesday. - though she was not the source of the first newspaper to discover the figures involved.

But there is also a second question, obvious from the above to all except politicians and journalists, which is how much all this matters - however annoying it is to the presentation control-freaks who inhabit every corner of the government? First, Ms Harman hasn't suddenly discovered a sudden and new interest in child care when she needs to. Speaking in the Commons last Friday Malcolm Chisholm - who has no reason whatever to suck up to Ms Harman since he resigned as a social security minister in protest against cuts in lone parents benefit.- paid a handsome tribute to her for being passionate about the subject since she came into the Commons in 1983 and said the government's National Childcare Strategy - of which this month's budget provisions will be a central part - would be a "lasting monument to her". Women - in every age group including pensioners - and children are those on whom poverty falls disproportionately. She has articulated this fact consistently. And she has endeavoured - with an admittedly co-operative Chancellor - to ensure that the problem is addressed in the budget.

It's a commonplace that Ms Harman isn't exactly popular in her party. Some of it is her fault. (She must bear her share of the blame for both the execution and the presentation of the lone parents' decision) But some of it isn't. As Gordon Brown's Shadow Chief Secretary she was obliged to tour the offices of her colleagues warning them that cherished spending commitments would have to be ditched. And as Shadow Employment Secretary, she did a lot first to broaden the consensus for a national minimum wage high enough to make a difference but not high enough to send unemployment soaring again. But she did not make many friends among party fundamentalists, or in the unions, for her steadfast refusal to hint at figures at the higher, pounds 4 per hour plus, end of the spectrum. That was nothing compared with her decision to send her second son to a grammar school. It infuriated many people in the Labour Party - including Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's Press Secretary - who thought it was a betrayal of Labour's commitment to comprehensive education. And it infuriated many more who had made their own choice of school with more attention to political orthodoxy than to what they might, as private citizens, have judged the best interests of their children. Finally she annoyed many male Labour MPs by backing women's quotas - an irony in view of the fact that she has now been accused of trying to improve her standing in the Labour hierarchy by promoting women's issues. And this was all before she carried the can for what was, when all is said and done, a collective decision made jointly with the Treasury to cut lone parents' benefit. And before she was summoned to No 10 and personally reprimanded by the Prime Minister for floating via the use of the term "affluence tests" the notion that the some benefits were still being wasted on those who didn't need them. This may have been presentationally unwise at the time ; for a government seeking to reform welfare it would have been incredible if the government wasn't testing the validity of universal benefits to destruction. Moreover Ms Harman also has some qualities which tend to be overlooked. She is tough. She is a welfare reform believer in a Cabinet which is less full of hard edged modernisers than it is sometimes assumed. Her relations with her Minister of State Frank Field - after a wholly disastrous start - appeared to have improved significantly to the credit of both of them. Of course Gordon Brown remains the unchallenged architect of what now promises to be a budget both redistributive and fiscally prudent. But she has played her part. It isn't fashionable to say so, but she deserves her share of the credit too.