Number 10 now believes that it was a far more concerted attempt to undermine Downing Street's position and keep the intelligence services out of the firing line.
Richard Rogers, who advised Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson on architecture and planning, said he was "totally bemused" by the extent of cuts to spending on planning and warned that it would undermine Downing Street's localism policy, which is intended to devolve decision-making powers to community groups.
Moderate Tories who have welcomed the prime minister's move to the centre ground have warned that the cuts to tax credits, outlined by the chancellor in his budget in July, could undermine Downing Street's attempts to appear as the "workers' party".
Pundits warned that such royal treatment might undermine her "down home" persona, but the makeover may have been a savvy move: New research adds more weight to the idea that voters value attractiveness more than competence in the faces of female politicians.
As I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago.
Over 50,000 Revenue and Customs workers will go on strike tomorrow in protest at "massive cuts" they claim undermined efforts to clamp down on tax avoidance schemes.
But such laws were often watered down or undermined, and results have been mixed.Officially, the EU takes no interest in the political or moral records of national leaders as long as their actions do not breach the law.
A1 Angry Resignation at E.P.A. Eric V. Schaeffer, a top environmental enforcement official, expressed frustration with the Bush administration for policies that he said undermined efforts to crack down on industrial polluters.
Some of the most fascinating details in "Bull by the Horns" concern instances when Ms. Bair and her F.D.I.C. colleagues proposed various ways to deal with mortgages, only to be shot down or undermined by Mr. Geithner and his colleagues at Treasury (see, for example, Chapter 21).
Now that the government's priority has shifting to fighting terrorism, and with the White Houses political strategy complicated by last year's recession and the shift in control of the Senate to the Democrats, many Bush proposals have been slowed, watered down or undermined by the administration's own actions.
