Crow he may, but Hague has plenty to worry about

There are several rules about mid-term elections of the kind we had 10 days ago, though there were more elections than usual. One is that the party representatives put the best gloss they can afford on the results. Inevitably those glosses are shinier because of the affection which broadcasters show for elections. Though there are complaints that programmes devoted to politics are diminishing - it is also reported that coverage of the party conferences will be reduced drastically - television and radio remain election aficionados. The appointed party hacks are out in force.

Another rule is that the journalistic response comes in waves, the second wave bearing different, even contradictory messages. In our trade we cannot bear to state the obvious or repeat what has been said a few days before. Thus Tony's Town Hall Troubles become a normal case of Blair's Mid-Term Blues; while Labour Livingstone Disaster is transformed into Small Earthquake in London: Not Many Hurt.

The only explanation which seems to me to fit the apparently contradictory results - an Independent winning in London with a Conservative coming in a respectable second, the Conservatives doing well in the local elections but losing Romsey to the Liberal Democrats - is that people were voting not only against the Government but against party politics as well. The two are connected. New Labour came to power presenting itself somehow as a non-political party. Additional supplies of that mysterious Highland brew "The Spirit of John Smith" had been discovered and were now being bottled for the mass market with a fetching new label somewhere near Tunbridge Wells.

Certainly this was the impression Mr Tony Blair gave. He gave it, for example, over the reform of Prime Minister's Questions. When Mr Blair made the transformation from 15-minute sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays to 30 minutes on Wednesdays, the Conservatives accused him of suffering from monomania and of being afraid to face the representatives of the people. These seem to me contradictory charges, but there we are.

The place is now as big a bear garden as ever or bigger, in that the show goes on for half an hour. Mr William Hague makes hurtful observations, some of which are funny; while Mr Blair indulges in what the libel lawyers call vulgar abuse. But I have little doubt that when the idea of changing PMQs first came to him, he honestly intended a change for the better: to make it a period when genuine questions would receive serious answers, minds occasionally meet, and sweetness and light hover gently over the proceedings.

Some hope! In fact, when the event was inaugurated as recently as 1961, and the principal bout of the afternoon was between Harold Macmillan and Hugh Gaitskell, the contestants behaved towards each other with the utmost civility. The right honourable gentleman, Macmillan would say, had made a most interesting suggestion. There might be something in it. He would certainly look into the matter. Alas, it would take a long time to arrive at any firm conclusion. The right honourable gentleman, having held high office, would understand that only too well. In the meantime, he thanked him for his valuable remarks.

It was hardly a Socratic seminar but it was at least polite. We may not be able to - may not want to - return to those days. But what would make the present sessions less of a bear garden would be to abolish the open question asking the Prime Minister his engagements for the day and (as Mr Tam Dalyell has long recommended) to insist on a specific question. It would also help if some of Mr Hague's interventionist privileges were reduced, and leaders of all opposition parties placed on the same footing of being allowed two questions only. But Question Time is inevitably a political occasion in the same way as a boxing match is an event in which the participants get hurt. The strange thing about this non-political government is that everything has become political: the Dome at Greenwich, the Stadium at Wembley, the new baby at No 10 and the new Tate Gallery opposite St Paul's, which Mr Blair apparently tried to open with a speech of his own, only to be informed that the Queen had already been booked. There is nothing unprecedented about behaviour of this kind. Some of us remember Harold Wilson's appearance on the England team's hotel balcony after they had won the World Cup in 1966. It is the scale of the operation that is different.

Likewise with the people in and around No 10. Prime ministers have always had favourites and confidants, from Disraeli's Monty Corry to Margaret Thatcher's Charles Powell. There are more of them now, clustered menacingly around Mr Blair like Madonna's bodyguards. And the distinction between work for the Government and work for the party, between information and propaganda, is being increasingly obscured.

It was Lady Thatcher who politicised the Civil Service by making clear that those who shared her views and advanced her causes could expect quicker promotion. Mr Blair has the same approach. They may or may not know that this was the approach recommended by the thinkers of Old Labour: Harold Laski and, up to a point, R H S Crossman, who believed that a proper Labour government would first have to dominate a recalcitrant Civil Service.

The election results were, I think, a response not only to a failure to improve the health service, education, transport and, above all, pensions but also to the turning of everything into a matter of party politics. The gainer may be Mr Charles Kennedy and the Liberal Democrats. All the parties interpret election results to suit their own purposes. What was, to Mr Kennedy, a glorious victory for the Liberal Democrats in Romsey was, to Mr Hague, a catastrophic defeat for Labour and, to Mr Blair, a humiliating reverse for the Conservatives. The observer of the passing scene must conclude that, of the three, it is Mr Hague who has most to be worried about.

For as long as I can remember, the progressive orthodoxy has been of the "opening to the left". Its most eloquent proponent was the former Liberal leader Jo Grimond. Politics would rearrange itself so that a Conservative party would remain but Labour and the Liberals would somehow - no one was sure precisely how, but somehow - come together as a new force, leaving a leftist rump of Old Labour to squabble among themselves. This was the vision not only of Grimond but of Lord Jenkins, Mr Paddy Ashdown and, now, Mr Blair too. This is, after all, that Project in which the Prime Minister is currently engaged.

But it has always been more realistic to see the Liberal Democrats and, before them, the Social Democrats and the Liberals as the alternative to the Conservatives rather than to Labour. This truth was concealed during those long years when the Tories were full of life and Labour seemed to be at death's door. Now that the positions of the old major parties are reversed, the Conservatives in decline, why should Mr Kennedy, in default of a promise of electoral reform, do anything at all to help Mr Blair?