Bernard Ingham: End-of-term report – they must do much better

It is not a pretty sight and does not inspire confidence in its future. Indeed, it is a bit of a mess.

Yet with the middle class being squeezed until the pips squeak – and don’t forget we all consider ourselves middle class now – the Con-Dem coalition is only a few points, if that, adrift of Labour in the public opinion polls. Is this a measure of its achievement or a commentary on this generation of politicians?

I leave you to decide. My concern, as an ex-press secretary, is not so much how well the Government is perceived but how effectively it has conducted itself over its first 15 months.

Curiously, for a government led by two former PR chappies – David Cameron and Nick Clegg – it has been direst where we might have expected it to excel. This is not for want of staff. The coalition may be disbanding the Central Office of Information, which had some economic clout as a bulk buyer of advertising space, but departmental press, publications and publicity staff remain pretty well as bloated as Tony Blair left them.

Comparisons are not easy but I reckon they require at least twice as many in No 10 as the eight Margaret Thatcher allowed me to give her 365-day 24-hour cover from 1979-90. This ignores the website squad, which we did not need since we managed without computers as well as mobile phones.

It also ignores the increased intensity of the 24-hour media, though I fear Alastair Campbell made it a rod for his own and his successors’ backs.

Suffice it to say, the coalition is not short of presentational hands. That could be part of the problem, though in this case I doubt it. Tightly knit groups of communicatively motivated men, to coin a phrase, score more goals than a surfeit of spinners.

Nor can we accuse the No 10 media team of neglect over publicity opportunities or efforts to cater for a media far more interested in how they are spun than the substance of policy.

The problem, as ever, is with the message. Britain has a coalition because the voters, disgusted with their politicians with both feet in the expenses trough, funked a clear decision when the nation’s financial state demanded one. A Con-Dem government came into being to rescue us from a fate worse than Greece’s. That is – or should be – its manifest overriding purpose.

This noble objective has become obscured by two things: first, the appalling, nonsensical waste in the system which the coalition seems unable to staunch for want of determination or law or because, thanks to Europe, it is not master in its own house; and second, its reformatory overload stemming from Cameron’s determination not to waste his first Parliament as Blair did.

The coalition’s ambition as a reforming government has far outstripped its ability to devise in short order policies across education, the NHS, welfare and criminal justice that stand the test of detailed public scrutiny. As a result, the media are losing count of U-turns.

Of course, these problems have been exacerbated by a government of two competing parties with one – the Lib Dems – deep in the electoral mire.

As I say, it is all a bit of a mess. But the mess is of the politicians’ making, not that of its media managers. Yet Cameron, for all the questions about his judgment in employing Andy Coulson, is unchallenged as Prime Minister and likely to remain so. He is head and shoulders above the crowd.

I suspect, however, that if he is to bring HMS Great Britain home to port ship-shape and financially secure in 2015 he will have to make sure the Government looks as if it always has its overriding purpose clearly in mind.

That means he can’t keep batting away his backbenchers’ demands for action on the likes of immigration, welfare, the public sector and the dead hand of Europe. He also needs to persuade Nick Clegg and his unruly mob that they have no future whatsoever if the coalition collapses in an untidier mess than we find it in July 2011.