John Hutton

Up until yesterday, I didn’t care much for John Hutton – a particularly strident Blairite who failed to make any impact at all in work and pensions, business and regulatory reform and defence. Quite a list of cabinet jobs to be rubbish at.

However, the revelation that he was able, along with the rest of us, in 2006 to see that Gordon Brown would be a disaster (he used a rather more colourful adjective to proceed the word “disaster“) as PM leaves at least a vestige of his reputation intact. Eddie Mair extracted this information from him yesterday in a fantastic interview that suggested Hutton has rather given up on Parliament – he was certainly not combative in his attempts to deflect the question.

It all asks the obvious poser of why, when big beasts such as Hutton, John Reid, Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers were all pretty much implacably opposed to Gordon becoming PM, they didn’t put up more of a fight to stop it. I suspect that although Hutton may have only recently given up on Parliament, they all gave up a while ago.

How strange too that Hutton couldn’t show the same perceptiveness about the war in Afghanistan that he reserved for the leadership of his own party.