Was all this worth it just for the sake of - Wales, Mr Blair?

The Blair government lost, not its soul, but some of its innocence last Saturday at Cardiff

REMEMBER THAT bit in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, when Thomas More tells young Richard Rich, who has betrayed him for the sake of becoming the Welsh Attorney General: "It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales!" When at the weekend Alan Michael was declared the victor in the contest for the leadership of the Welsh Assembly it was similarly easy to wonder whether the pain was all worth it for a job about which the Welsh people, never mind the rest of us, are highly apathetic, which will have little more power than that of a leader of a large metropolitan county council, and which it is probable, if Mr Blair had been wholly true to his instincts, might not have existed at all.

Indeed it's a miracle that Welsh politics has any capacity to reverberate in London at all. But it does. The referendum on Welsh devolution, which voted Yes by the narrowest and most perilous of majorities, was a more seminal event than it was given credit for at the time. It was a shock to the New Labour system; it demonstrated that even a vigorous campaign by a wildly popular Prime Minister on the back of a huge general election victory, could not guarantee to turn public opinion on an issue about which the larger segment were apathetic at best and downright hostile at worst.

It is not too much to say that, if it had not been for that shock, we might now be confidently awaiting a referendum on House of Commons electoral reform in the current Parliament. Now Wales has reverberated again: the election of Mr Michael, Mr Blair's favoured candidate, over the unmistakably more popular Rhodri Morgan, with the pivotal help of some distinctly old Labour union block votes, has become a symbol of what Mr Blair's critics insist is a control-freak personality, this time taking away with one hand some of what he gave with the other through the act of devolution.

Tony Blair has not sold his soul to get Alan Michael elected (though to read the Welsh press over the past few weeks you would think he had.) But he has paid a price. Within Wales Labour is now going to have run harder to stand still. The Welsh Assembly elections in 73 days time were never going to be easy; there were worries that as in the English local elections last year, the core Labour vote would stay at home whether because they were mildly discontented with the Government, or whether, conversely, and more probably, they were quite content with its performance and perceived that since there was no great Tory threat there was no point in turning out to vote.

In the Welsh assembly elections, moreover, abstentionism was always going to increase because of apathy about the assembly. Now there is a third factor: the resentment among Labour Party activists and members (64 per cent of whom voted on Saturday for Mr Morgan) which will make them less enthusiastic about turning out for the vote on May 6.

The once unthinkable possibility that Labour will win less than an overall majority of the 60 assembly seats, or that the Welsh Nationalists will hold the balance of power, cannot now be ruled out. As a result Peter Hain, the Welsh Office minister who ran Mr Michael's campaign and is largely responsible for the fact that his victory was not even narrower, has been pressing Downing Street energetically to sanction a campaign directed at the party's own heartlands: a little less Daily Mail and a little more Mirror, a little more emphasis on the Government's redistributive measures from the national minimum wage to the Working Families Tax Credit.

Beyond Wales, however, the price is rather different. The uncomfortable fact that Mr Michael depended in part for votes cast by the TGWU in the same, ballot-free way for which the union was reviled for voting for Tony Benn in the deputy leadership contest in 1981, cannot be overlooked. One Member One Vote (OMOV) democracy has taken a battering and, albeit on a small scale, Tony Blair has had to rely on union leadership just as - whisper it - Harold Wilson used to rely on Bill Carron, the engineering union leader, to beat the left in the 1960s. It is a safe bet we won't be hearing quite so much about further reductions in the block vote at party conferences, much less breaking the party links with the unions altogether, for the time being. The Blair government lost, not its soul, but some of its innocence last Saturday in Cardiff. It amounts to an admission that OMOV - in trade unions as well as constituencies - was a means to doing worthwhile things like getting Tony Blair elected rather than as an end in itself.

But that's an old story. Mr Blair has always more been more interested in ends than means. For him Wales has been sorted now. It a safe bet he spent most of yesterday thinking about the much more fundamental questions raised by Sir William Macpherson's report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence and in particular whether Sir Paul Condon should be made, under the threat of the sack, finally to admit that "institutional racism" has prevailed in the Metropolitan Police. The Prime Minister will not exactly be spending this week worrying whether he was right to allow union block vote to be deployed in the election of a politician most people outside Wales, and a lot inside, would still find hard to put a face to.

It doesn't follow though that Mr Blair's apparently Leninist fixation with ends rather than means works against the interests of devolved government. What has been interesting about the Morgan-Michael contest is precisely what it shows us about Blair the meritocrat.

By co-incidence Mr Morgan and Mr Michael had both worked on Blair teams in opposition, Mr Morgan when the future leader was Shadow energy spokesman and Mr Michael when he was shadow Home Secretary. It wasn't personal or ideological; he just thought Mr Michael a lot better than Mr Morgan. And you can only think he doesn't have a right to influence who should be the party's candidate to spend pounds 8bn a year of the Welsh taxpayers' money (when he has the right to appoint Bishops, Regius Professors BBC chairmen and goodness who else) if you think that devolution is as much a gift for the party membership as it is for the wider electorate. But it isn't. It's for the consumers, not the practitioners of politics. Now if, and only if, he is right about Mr Michael then it follows (1) that he will do a better job for Wales and (2) that the Welsh people will be more likely to vote a Michael-led Welsh Labour party in the future.

Mr Blair has certainly stored up some problems with a party membership in which he once put so much faith. But if nothing else, by paying this price for getting Michael selected, Blair has shown that whatever his initial doubts, he now accepts that the Welsh assembly will happen and it needs to work well.

So was all this worth it just for Wales? Well, yes, as a matter of fact it just might have been.