Despite the claims of Blairism, Douglas Hurd hears the engine of government grinding A new chapter on the peril of politics

Government, were all immoral rogues. That really is quite trying.''

Any schadenfreude on Hurd's part, then, seems understandable. He began his career at the Foreign Office, and ended his Cabinet duties there in 1995 when he retired as Foreign Secretary. After a gruelling five years which encompassed the collapse of communism, the Gulf war, and Bosnia. Those cataclysms aside, the continuing bumbling over Sandline couldn't be better timed for the author of a new novel which is propelled by the Machiavellian twists and turns of government. Yet Hurd's vexation is prompted more by a school master's pernickety insistence that house rules are based on experience and should therefore command respect. Even with unremitting slog any Foreign Secretary, he says, can normally hope to alter things by only two or three degrees. ''This idea that you can change things suddenly by 180 degrees really isn't on because that's when you come unstuck.''

But cock-up or conspiracy; the folly of the priggish, or indolence exposed? In recent days these words have stuck like molluscs to the landscape of the Sandline fiasco, so which does Hurd find most convincing? ''Oh, certainly cock-up. Most things are. But the fact that they didn't know what was going on means something is wrong.'' In fact, for all that Blairism claims to be running things more efficiently, Hurd hears the engine of government knocking and grinding. ''It's not working right.'' Yet as a Tory grandee with two other departments also under his belt - Northern Ireland Secretary (1984 to 1985) and Home Secretary (1985 to 1989) - could he realistically claim anything other? Well, as politicians go, Hurd has never been blinkered, a distinction which latterly left him isolated on the moderate, Europhile wing of John Major's hapless administration.

''The events in Sierra Leone are not a huge matter: the rightful government has been restored. But the manoeuvres poor Robin Cook has had to go through in the last week - and the way the Prime Minister took a different line the other day - just show the difficulties when you pretend you're adopting a more moral line than others. I don't think he and the other Foreign Ministers were deceiving us when they said they didn't know. And he may get out of this mess because there is no denying Cook's intelligence, and I don't personally believe he's a dishonourable man. But I don't think he's handling his time right, or his department.'' Yet if indolence is the culprit, that surely represents a profound character switch in Cook. He may have changed wives but can he also have changed a lifetime's beavering for knowledge which at least twice led to him being locked in the Commons library because the

janitors presumed everyone had left?

''Well, it's hard to say that indolence is to blame,'' reflects Hurd, ''but he gave an interview the other day in which he spoke about the treaty he had negotiated with his private secretary, limiting the amount of paper he got in the evenings. Now I understand why, but I'm afraid that being Foreign Secretary is bloody hard work. You're busy meeting people all through the day and really the paper work doesn't begin until around 11pm.'' Hurd himself adhered strictly to a self-imposed 1am rule. ''I didn't work after that time but I constantly did massive work between 10.30pm and one because I knew that if I didn't it would begin to accumulate and eventually I'd be caught out.'' The management of time, he says, is really the essence of government now, an imperative which runs through The Shape of Ice, the novel which brings Hurd to Glasgow today for a fully booked lunchtime appearance in the

Royal Concert Hall's Conversations series.

The book is set in what he likes to think is the near future but it could just as easily be the past, for the Tories are back in power and the Cabinet seem to inhabit remarkably familiar skins. Joan Freetown, the loathsome Chancellor, resonates with Thatcher busy-bodying and the Prime Minister, Simon Russell, is like an amalgam of Major and Heseltine, while the clever but slapdash Home Secretary, Roger Courtauld, with his liberal leanings and beery conviviality, must be fiction's answer to Kenneth Clarke. In which case, who is Hurd? Foreign Secretary Peter Makewell is the most plausible candidate, but the author discourages this spotting game, saying only that he kept a diary for many years and did draw on it a little for it material.

''People always like to say: 'Oh, that's so and so', but actually what I've not done is take individuals and plop them into the book because that wouldn't be a novel. However, of course you notice certain things about those around you: what they wear, how they stand and sit, and you make a little note in your mind.'' As for the plot, it couldn't be more relevant: Britain is being pressured to send military aid to an overthrown foreign government, the Far East is convulsed by financial corruption, our jails are in uproar, and peace in Northern Ireland has been ruptured by the lethal handiwork of a breakaway cadre of Republicans. The only improbable note is that Grey Man Incarnate, Prime Minister Russell, has sufficiently recovered from a heart attack to ignore his wife's demand that he should quit, and stumbles instead into an amorous liaison with his press secretary.

But THIs is hardly the ghost of Bernard Ingham or his successors; in Artemis Palmer, in fact, we see no resemblance at all to any No 10 minder of our acquaintance. Where Hurd excels is in conveying the tumult of crises in modern politics, and the peril of activity smothering thought. At one point the PM is handed a note: 1. Prisons. 2. Moscow; both up in smoke. ''Everything comes at you and it's so easy to get into a muddle not through your own fault. Cook, I think, has had bad luck. I never criticised him when he got into trouble in India or indeed Palestine because I've been in that sort of problem myself: people trip you one way or another. And he's in a phase now, quite well known in politics, where everyone is waiting for the next thing to go wrong.''

Hurd thinks Cook's notable success so far has been achieving consensus of the landmine issue, but maybe the real lesson of the Sandline furore is never be holier than thou. ''Absolutely, and get a grip on your department. If you say: 'I'm not going to bother finishing my red boxes because this is a night off', well, first there is delay and then, of course - since decisions are necessary - officials begin to take decisions themselves. Not a good idea.'' Hurd slaps the side of a coffee table for emphasis. He is a tall man with the same haircut he must have had since Eton, but for as long as anyone can remember its silveriness made him instantly detectable amid the drab slab of suits at summit gatherings. Occasionally he hunches his shoulders, not so much through nonchalance as nervous habit, and, once or twice, he restlessly drapes a leg over the arm of his chair; a man unaccustomed to sitting

still.

He is 67 and has been out of active politics for a year, but even that hasn't slowed him. A NatWest director, he keeps his air miles topped up by acting for them as a sort of global ambassador, and he is also on the board of Coutts. Last year he took over from Jon Snow, the newscaster, as chairman of the Prison Reform Trust, a liberal pressure group which certainly found itself at odds with the former Home Secretary, Michael Howard. So, in that context, the fall from power of the Tory right has saved Hurd considerable embarrassment.

But he has never really been a confrontationalist, probably because he served his apprenticeship in the diplomatic corps. It was as Edward Heath's political secretary at Downing Street, however, that he mastered the protocol of packing the Red Box. ''It's like a geological strata. On the top there is something that commands attention, and, quite soon after, come the more difficult papers which really need decisions. In the middle there's something light-hearted, a guest list perhaps, and the stodgy stuff is at the bottom. So, you try to help the Minister progress through the box, and in that sense it's an art, a small art.''

Hurd's fictional Foreign Secretary Makewell is an Englishman emotionally captured by Scotland, and in a way that says something about the author himself: Hurd's county is Oxfordshire, but he is in fact half-Scottish. On devolution, he says the real question remains whether the Labour Party is right in saying the system will actually help the Union or whether the SNP is right in claiming it as a decisive step towards independence. ''I don't feel passionately against devolution but I would feel passionately against separation. That, I think, would be a great act of destruction. Just now, though, who knows how it will work? Quite touch and go, I'd say.''

And Blair, whom he once described as a mystery, how does Hurd see him emerging? ''Well, he's less of a mystery to me now because of Ireland. He showed great energy and authority in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement, and I respect him a lot for that. But on Europe, and the way he wants British politics to go, I read about his views but I can't say I find his words particularly revealing.'' Of course, the subject of Ireland is veiled in deja vu for Hurd who worked on the Sunningdale Agreement with Heath and the late Ulster leader, Brian Faulkner. But Ian Paisley wrecked the settlement, as he wishes to so again. ''That particularly strident form of rejectionism is still there, still has its supporters, but it isn't dominant in the way it used to be. Paisley closed the power stations and brought the Province to a standstill. He can't do that now. This recent development, though, has shown

David Trimble especially to be a man of substance. I don't know him well but I wrote to him after the agreement to say I thought we all owed him a lot for having the courage to take the stand he has.''

As for Douglas Hurd himself, despite its consuming problems, his last Cabinet post was one he enjoyed enormously. He called it ''political tourism'' and loved every minute of the travel and ''foreign food''. So, does he miss the buzz of office? ''Not the cut and thrust of the Commons at all but, yes, I do miss not being in the know. I mean, there are people I can ring up when I want to learn what's happening, but the information no longer comes to me automatically, and when it concerns something you've been involved in like Northern Ireland, then you feel that loss.'' But he still lives in his Oxfordshire constituency and is now engaged in fighting for its cottage hospital which a wicked Labour Government is trying to close. Funny business, politics, all the same.

n Douglas Hurd will also be at Waterstone's, George Street, Edinburgh, at 7.30pm tonight.

n The Shape of Ice by Douglas Hurd: Little Brown, #15.99.