Daily Mail, 17 December 2004

When a government minister resigns after a scandal, there is usually a feeling of closure. With the resignation of the former Home Secretary David Blunkett, however, this has not been the case. It has left a bitter taste in the mouth.

Far from expressing any contrition, Mr Blunkett has presented himself as a noble figure, sacrificing himself for the sake of the small child he insists is his son. But he did not sacrifice himself for his son. He was forced out when he realised that the Budd inquiry had uncovered emails and faxes that would prove he had indeed abused his public office for private gain. Other claimed abuses of his office have been left unresolved.

Equally sickening is the way he has tried to justify his behaviour towards the Quinn family, claiming that he is entitled to a private life.

Of course, no-one says that anyone who has broken up a family and remarried should be barred from public office. What matters, surely, is not so much the original lapse but how the erring person then behaves. And on this count, Mr Blunkett has, in my view, displayed an absence of judgment incompatible with the high office he held.

For against his ex-lover’s wishes he has been trying to break up another man’s family, and destroy the stability and security of two tiny children who would be torn apart between two competing fathers.

This is not to excuse Mrs Quinn’s seemingly appalling behaviour. But she and her husband have decided to make a fresh start for their family. Mr Blunkett, however, appears to have rewritten the rules of paternal responsibility.

He has taken the principle that, after a relationship breaks down, a father should not desert his offspring and stood this on its head. For this doctrine was never intended to give the lover of an adulterous wife the ‘right’ to destroy the family life of the cuckolded husband — nor to use a biological claim to ruin the lives of children brought up in that family.

Once-a-week fatherhood — or even split parenting — makes the best of a bad job, but very often involves inevitably destabilised or downright miserable children . The idea that this is preferable to stable family life and is a responsible way to behave in these circumstances, as Mr Blunkett claims, is grotesque.

In addition, his behaviour in putting the heavily pregnant Mrs Quinn under so much stress that there are concerns for the safety of her unborn child —the child which he has also claimed as his —has been cruelly selfish.

He has repeatedly insisted that he will not talk about his private life, saying that he does not want to expose his son to this public scrutiny. But since the scandal broke, he has done little else but talk about his personal life.

His sentimental, self-pitying resignation interviews were notable for failing utterly to put the interests of these two children first. Instead, they were all about himself and what he had been through.

Even worse, he maintains that he has simply tried to act responsibly. In fact, he has acted like a man possessed whose judgment has simply deserted him. And he was no ordinary politician but the Home Secretary —the lead minister, no less, on family policy.

Of course, Mr Blunkett deserves compassion on account of his blindness and his harsh upbringing. A lonely man under enormous pressure, he fell into the clutches of an unscrupulous woman and lost both his heart and his head as a result.

But he is the last person who would want to be treated any differently on account of his disability. And —maybe because of it — he has shown serious flaws of character.

As a journalist, I have had dealings with him for a quarter of a century, since before he was even Leader of Sheffield city council. Like so many others, I hugely admired two things in particular.

First was his astonishing grasp of detail and prodigious memory for facts, along with the strength of character which enabled him to overcome his blindness and get to the top.

The second was his decent refusal to fall in with the socially destructive fashions of the age. Instead he kept faith with the beleaguered, law-abiding majority who believed in doing the right thing.

So what happened? I think that power changed him. Even before he was appointed to Mr Blair’s Cabinet, he was displaying an arrogant and overweening desire to have his own way, to reject all criticism and to boast that he alone should take all the credit for the transformations in policy he insisted he had achieved.

The result was that in both the education department and the Home Office, he made some very serious mistakes because he simply refused to listen. And now, this capacity for self-delusion has led him to redefine irresponsibility as responsibility, abuse of public office as integrity, and the destruction of a family as a noble personal sacrifice.

Tony Blair told him: ‘You leave government with your integrity intact’. With that statement, which sticks in the craw of so many who have been sickened by this whole sorry spectacle, the Prime Minister has allowed the personal tragedy of a flawed but remarkable man to reflect the disturbing absence of both truth and responsibility in the administration from which David Blunkett has now made such an ignominious exit.

Posted by melanie at December 17, 2004