The prime minister will be hoping that a lackadaisical approach by ministers is not blamed for the evacuation failings
One of the perils for a prime minister on an overseas trip is looking painfully out of touch when a crisis is brewing back home. It is usually unfair, but pictures of a prime minister basking in the sunshine or ? even worse ? glad-handing with monarchs and emirs plays dreadfully back home.
Downing Street knows there is a risk that David Cameron has fallen into this trap over the past 48 hours, as the government struggled to take command of the repatriation of British citizens from Libya. This explains why Cameron offered an unequivocal apology in a series of television interviews in Muscat on the final day of his Gulf tour.
The sort of expat Britons who live in Libya, many of whom work in the oil industry, will sympathise with a prime minister travelling to the Gulf to promote British trade. But they ? and their families ? will not take kindly to a prime minister who appears unable to command the sort of decisive response masterminded by Nicolas Sarkozy.
The announcement by a remorseful Cameron of an inquiry into what went wrong shows the government knows it has presided over a mess. The much mocked French managed to fly a government jet into Libya while a jet chartered by the British languished at Gatwick airport. The British charter jets have now evacuated hundreds of British citizens.
Cameron will be hoping the failures are blamed on a series of cock-ups. He might even be able to cope with what he and William Hague have described as "systemic" failures as the possible cause. We are a new government facing the first crisis of this kind; our mission will be to clear up the disorganised system left by the last lot, ministers will say.
Downing Street will be hoping ? or possibly ensuring ? that the inquiry does not lay the finger of blame at a lackadaisical approach by ministers. Cameron has recently reorganised his Downing Street operation after realising that the prime ministerial writ was not running throughout Whitehall.
Cameron's aides said the old system, in which the policy unit worked to its own agenda and did not shadow individual Whitehall departments, was caused by a reduction of special advisers after the election. Critics blamed the set-up on Cameron's hands-off approach, akin to a chairman of the board rather than a chief executive, for the failure to get a grip over Whitehall.
Cameron will need to work hard to show that this mindset was not to blame for the mess over the repatriation of Brits. In his interviews in Muscat he laid the blame on the government's standard response that normally works and which did work in the recent evacuations from Egypt. This is to hold back from chartering planes to avoid "collapsing" scheduled flights. This approach fell apart in Libya when British Airways and BMI cancelled flights with just a few hours notice.
The prime minister grabbed hold of this crisis on Wednesday when he arranged a series of conference calls from Doha with Hague and Liam Fox.
There were more conference calls in the early hours of Thursday morning from his hotel suite in Muscat after a banquet with Sultan Qaboos of Oman.
Cameron's challenge is to show that his overall "big society" approach, in which people are expected to take greater responsibility over their lives as the government steps back, is not to blame. There are, after all, key Tory thinkers who believe that the main mission of this government is to preside over a revolution in which people no longer think that the state is the first port of call.
Britain loves to mock the French. But the sharp arrival of a French government jet in Tripoli showed that a bit of "dirigisme" does come in handy every so often.
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