As a plan for government, it was to lead to an inevitable failure. All the Government’s current difficulties with the public sector are the bitter fruit of the founding lie.The Blairites had known that they were lying about public spending. But they assumed that once in office, they could turn this to their advantage. They would be able to boast about the vast amounts that were already being spent, as if they could take the credit Early on, this worked. Every time the NHS drew on a Tory-approved budget to allocate funds for cancer patients, Labour ministers would trumpet the news as if no previous government had ever spent any money on cancer.Then the problems began.

Just as their Tory predecessors had, Mr Blair’s ministers discovered that in the public sector, huge expenditures often achieve minimal results. For a brief period, Mr Blair seemed ready to respond to this in a way that might have earned him the place in history that he craves He appeared ready to contemplate radical reform Then the moment of courage passed. Instead, he merely opted for higher and higher spending, with a predictable outcome: record fiscal deficits for very little improvement in performance. There was no way out of that except spin.There is, however, one area of policy where the moment of courage did not pass: Iraq Here, the PM has an insurmountable difficulty. If he had opened his mind and his heart to the British people, explaining the range of reasons and calculations that had led him to take the risk of supporting President Bush, he would now have a claim on public respect But instead, Mr Blair chose spin and exaggeration.

This may be a Prime Minister who has forgotten how to tell the truth.His Government was born out of spin, has been sustained by spin and will depend on spin until the day it leaves office. Like a child’s spinning top, the moment the Blair Government stops spinning is the moment that it falls over.Nor will it be so easy for the Prime Minister to draw lines under the past, for there is a dead man, David Kelly, whose political inquest has still to be held. In charge, there will be a straightforward, somewhat reserved law lord with a clear intelligence and a strong sense of duty. Nothing will deflect Lord Hutton from establishing the facts, and no amount of spin will enable anyone to conceal them from his inquiry.As for the Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, these two are, in political terms, like Siamese twins.