Bernard Ingham: A strong opposition is vital to health of the country

Give 'em time, you may say. A week is a long time in politics, as

Harold Wilson put it. Things might suddenly change. They might, but they won't.

That is why I am somewhat exercised about the kind of scrutiny David Cameron and Nick Clegg are likely to get after the recess, starting today, even if Labour recovers its appetite for opposition.

I have two reasons for my concern. The first is my 24 years on the

inside of Whitehall. A formidable opposition makes for better

government. The Commons exercised real quality control until Margaret Thatcher came along. Under Michael Foot, Labour, at war with the enemy within – the loony Left – was such poor value that too much of Thatcher's second term was frittered away in the so-called "banana skin years" after the Falklands campaign.

I sometimes despaired and thanked the Lord when she drafted in Willie Whitelaw to crack the whip.

John Major was more taxed by Peter Mandelson's very successful campaign to plaster the Tories with sleaze than he was by Tony Blair's policies, which were essentially flexible as he sought to make Labour electable again.

In office, both Blair and Gordon Brown managed to squander political integrity, national reputation and money, partly because successive Tory oppositions were demoralised and next to useless.

Opposition matters to the health of this country and it is a long time since we had a decent one. Cameron most certainly cannot parade his name with pride. He should have walked it into No 10 instead of having to be helped in by the Liberal Democrats.

The second reason for my concern is Labour's condition after 13 years. They are in a sullen, peevish, "we wuz robbed" mood, with candidates for the leadership trying, not very edifyingly, to distance themselves from the past 13 years. Mandelson's book also shows how this band of brothers is truly cannibalistic, red in tooth and claw.

They are, in fact, in opposition because of their comprehensively disastrous failure in government. Deep down they must know they blew John Major's golden legacy in a very big way and that a discerning public will not for a long time readily trust them with the reins

again.

None of this is good for their confidence but what matters far more is that not one of the undistinguished bunch of five leadership candidates knows what he or she stands for. Certainly they have not succeeded in articulating it to me.

David Miliband, it seems, is the Blairite candidate. Ed Balls, suitably unattractively, represents the unattractive Brownites. Ed Miliband, garnering union support, is the throw-back candidate and Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott are as obscure as they are also-rans.

What are they offering us, apart from, possibly, a return to union domination and an expensive pseudo-Green future under Ed Miliband? Indeed, what can they offer us when their record hems them in on all sides? Not one of them even hints at the sort of intellectual power that promises a newly thought-out re-direction for Labour in the 21st century.

Yet without a guiding philosophy, they are nowhere. Ask the

Conservatives. Their loss of confidence after ousting their conviction leader, Thatcher, was so total that they stood for nothing or were so wishy washy that last May they could not instantly dispose of our worst post-war Prime Minister.

Even now, all that Cameron can offer is a repair job, however appealing his "Big Society" is to some of us since it asks something of the people instead of offering them handouts.

It may, of course, be that we have got exactly what we need at this juncture in our history – an ideologically unencumbered coalition to restore a measure of sanity to our affairs while all our political parties reassess what they are in business for.

It is conceivable that the coalition will get things working better, provided it improves on its gaffe-strewn performance of recent weeks.

Labour will, of course, make hay out of Clegg's "illegal" invasion of Iraq and Cameron's making us a junior Second World War partner of the US before America actually entered the war. But until it can develop a coherent, distinctive appeal, it is not going very far.

Nor is to going to keep the coalition on its toes.