On the first Monday after the general election as I tacked across the atrium of that grand parliamentary aviary Portcullis House what should I spot but the shining bespectacled face of Nick Raynsford. He was sitting in the "bistro" with his political adviser, his mobile phone within quick lunging distance on the table. If nerve ends could be visible every single one of them would be vibrating: he was waiting for a call from No 10 to tell him whether he still had a job.
He did. He remained at Eland House as Minister for Local Government. But something funny happened to housing, Raynsford's old portfolio. It went to that archetypal Blair "crony" Lord Falconer. Falconer takes planning and urban regeneration as well, leaving Raynsford's new brief curiously truncated, even with his additional responsibilities as Minister for London.
As spokesman in the Commons housing got Sally Keeble, former Labour leader of Southwark Council, a somewhat dour Blairophile from the 1997 intake taking on her first government job. This indicates that the watchword for housing for the new session is more likely to be management than innovation.
The housing green paper has been done - picking up the pieces of the consultation procedure and forming them into policy without alienating too many lobbies will be a difficult but engine-room sort of job. Ironically, Raynsford, from his local government berth, might still be influential if he seeks to simplify the prescriptive best value regulatory regime Hilary Armstrong put in place.
The long-heralded leasehold reform and commonhold legislation did make it into the Queen's Speech, so the Lord Chancellor will have to labour over that complex and potentially time-table defying measure (the Lords will pore over it syllable by syllable). And, funnily enough, the Homes Bill, providing for sellers' packs for house purchase, seems to have quietly disappeared after having failed to make the statute book by the time the election was called. The homelessness provisions, part of the same bill, were brought back to the Commons immediately in the new Parliament, but the remainder seems to have been put quietly to rest.
Implementation of the urban white paper, dependent largely on Treasury action on tax and planning reform, is also at the steady-as-she-goes stage. Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State and the very model of the modern Blairite manager, a man for whom charisma would be equated with wearing a daring, pale blue shirt in place of the regulation white, is likely to be overwhelmingly preoccupied by the transport side of the portfolio.
It is worth remembering, however, that he, too, was a local council leader on Tyneside before signing up as a new Labour moderniser. Byers, of course, is head of a new department.
The old DETR, the biggest one-stop shop in modern administrative history, is no more.
Along with transport and local government Byers takes "the regions" though the Department for Trade and Industry also has a minister covering grants and industrial support for the regions. But the much heralded bill providing for the election of assemblies to the English regions did not make it into the Queen's Speech, much to the indignation of Labour backbenchers.
Ironically, responsibility for the construction industry goes to Byers' old department, Trade and Industry. This will cause much distress at the new DTLR (or whatever acronym is devised.) Being minister for construction was one of the few jobs which offered the occasional decent trip abroad against the normal romantic excursions to run-down council estates in Hackney, boarded up tenements in Burnley and expanses of contaminated land in West Yorkshire.
The DTI has been desperate to accumulate "real" industries, in part to counter the question of what it existed for at all. But it is curious that in this age of "joined-up" government it should be separated from its most natural siblings.
If we start from the proposition that the old DETR was simply too unwieldy the new carve-up makes sense. We now have, in practice, a ministry for urban affairs and a ministry for rural affairs. Planning could have gone with either but in policy terms is more central to the urban portfolio than the rural one.
By definition the urban affairs department is dealing with domestic issues: the new DEFRA will overwhelmingly have international interlocutors, notably Brussels and the parties to conventions on issues like climate change. And, at last, DEFRA has a heavyweight minister.
Achieving joined-up government is not about institutions but about work practice but at least the institutional geometry now makes some sense.
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