There have been plenty of commentators willing to reflect on the similarities between Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton in the past few weeks: the political fortunes of both have been in freefall and neither seems to be able to connect with voters in they way they need to.

One more point of comparison struck me this week: both of them have latterly made a virtue of rejecting expert advice. 

From the point at which Gordon Brown became Prime Minister it has been bandied about that cannabis would be re-upgraded to Class B status.  As Kathy noted (and applauded) in her post last week, the government did so despite advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that it should remain in Class C. (I depart from Kathy slightly in my view that this won’t make a blind bit of difference, but that’s not my point here).

Meanwhile, Hillary, when asked to name a single economist who thought her notion of a summertime suspension of the US’s gas taxes was anything other than dumb, replied, “I'm not going to put my lot in with economists”.  300 economists responded by signing an open letter condemning the proposals.

So has the reign of the expert ended?

Some think it might, and have applauded the Government’s willingness to ignore the scientists.  Matthew Parris noted at the weekend that: “Advisers advise. Ministers decide. This is how it should be.”

He’s at least half right.  There has been a hollowing out of the political role in recent years, with the growth of an industry of advisers, special reports, quangos, expert regulators and the like, who now either take the decisions that Ministers used to take, or who provide the covering fire for Ministers to take decisions that don’t look popular.  At best, it’s a double-edged sword: for example, as a competition lawyer, I applaud the greater independence of the Office of Fair Trading and Competition Commission that the government has granted; but as a believer in the importance of the political role, it feels like another blow. 

But before we rush to applaud the government’s new found courage and insight, it’s worth stopping, and reflecting on the Hillary parallel.  She dismissed the views of the economists because it was easy and popular to do so.  George Bush did the same (on that occasion dismissing the views of 600 economists) when he imposed steel tariffs in 2001. 

On this side of the pond, the government ignored the expert regulatory structure it had set up for drug approvals when it was popular: it fast-tracked approval for breast cancer drug, Herceptin, back in 2005, in the face of a high profile campaign to make it available.  No such luck for patients whose condition didn’t have that backing.

And so it is with the government’s move on cannabis.  They can afford to ignore the expert advice because it is easy and popular to do so.  It’s the opposite of the “tough decisions” that the Prime Minister keeps telling us he’s taking.

When a government minister ignores expert advice because its not popular but right to do so, that’s when we should applaud.  That’s when the tide might start to turn in favour of the relevance of the political role.