It was a very Gordon Brown moment. Yesterday the Prime Minister unveiled the product of a great deal of pondering. Some of it had taken him years to work through in his mind. In his statement he tackled great issues of state, and expressed a willingness to introduce truly transforming policies. It might have been a political landmark. Yet somehow it was not. Where there were grand ideas, there was no detail. And where there was detail, there were no grand ideas.
The central intellectual argument that Mr Brown made yesterday is questionable. He asserted that the scandal over MPs' allowances demands a change in the structure of British democracy - in the voting system, decentralisation and the composition of the House of Lords. This connection is commonly made, but it is hardly an obvious one. If in years to come, a civics teacher attempted to explain to pupils that Britain has perpetual coalition government because Sir Gerald Kaufman once tried to claim too much for a television set, he might struggle.
So it is not surprising that the most confident and convincing parts of the Prime Minister's statement were his immediate proposals to act on the allowance system itself. Particularly welcome is the proposal for a parliamentary standards authority. The aspect of the allowances debacle that cause most public concern was the way in which MPs set their own rules and then benefited from them. Mr Brown trailed the other leaders in addressing the crisis, but he appears here to have grasped the central issue.
The moment that the Prime Minister passed on to the bigger questions, things became more murky. This is especially the case with electoral reform. Labour leaders, from Ramsay MacDonald onwards, have dallied with a change in the voting system. Yet, somehow, they never seem to introduce it when things are going well for them electorally. Mr Brown is offering proportional representation that may not be proportional, a Bill that he has not got time to introduce and a referendum he may not be in power to hold.
A similar vagueness characterises his comments about the House of Lords. It is not wrong to return to this question, but weary political observers can be excused a degree of scepticism about the final outcome - as they can if they incline their heads quizzically at talk of a written constitution. A prime minister with months of his term in office left and who cannot properly reshuffle his Cabinet is an intriguing candidate to fulfil the role of the British James Madison.
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The best approach to take to all these proposals is to take them as they come, if they come and to judge them on their merits. Mr Brown should understand that it will be immediately obvious if he is proposing a serious democratic reform or a tactical fix to avert electoral disaster.
It may not be obvious to link big constitutional reform to the allowances fiasco, but this does not necessarily mean that it is wrong. Certainly the public dismay at what was discovered reflected a general cynicism about politics and politicians. But the decision of the Prime Minister to talk of the big-ticket items of constitutional reform meant, precisely as this newspaper warned in a previous leading article, that he ignored some of the smaller, more direct, measures to make Parliament accountable.
Electoral reform and changes to the House of Lords demand White Papers, internal party debates, referendums. The discussions can go on, may well go on, for years without being settled. Meanwhile, issues such as open primaries, recall for MPs, looser whipping and better scrutiny of laws lie ignored. If the Prime Minister wants real change, it is to these smaller, vital reforms that he will have to turn. Or does he just wish to look like a reformer?