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Blood
Yorkshire Post - 11
September
2006
They are both hugely diminished. Tony Blair remains prime minister and has both title and, by virtue of his election victory, legitimacy. But he is being visibly drained of authority. Gordon Brown remains heir presumptive, but what was accepted as almost a moral claim to the succession has been severely eroded. And all the others are pygmies, albeit pygmies with pretensions.
There is only one clear winner from Labour’s self-inflicted torments: David Cameron. The Tory leader, by happy chance, was in India during the worst of the Labour in-fighting. He had no choice but to be a largely mute spectator which was exactly the right posture: when your enemies are determined to destroy themselves the sensible man leaves them to get on with it.
The Liberal-Democrats have lost. Their eternal hope is to be left holding the balance of power after an indecisive election. The last thing they want is a straight Conservative victory, but Labour descent into blood-letting has made that more likely, leaving them once again on the sidelines.
The main responsibility for the chaos must lie with Tony Blair. He has always had a Panglossian streak – if you want something hard enough somehow it happens. In more common language the tendency to confuse wishful thinking and reality. To believe that he could announce an undated departure without setting off a succession frenzy was pure fantasy.
Fantasy might have carried him through had it not been for the Prime Minister’s fractured relationship with the Labour Party. He has never liked his party. He does not carry its genetic code. He has defined his rule in opposition to his party, making clear that New Labour was different, invented, created, not merely a novel way of delivering old values. He has been the Labour Party’s general, never its High Priest.
Gordon Brown is diminished. The idea that there was a fundamental policy difference between him and Blair always seemed to me to be exaggerated, however much the unions and the “command economy” school of Labour MPs might invest in it. What now afflicts him is something much worse- the public analysis of his character.
Again, there is nothing new here. Brown is obsessively secretive, trusting a narrow circle of aides, resenting criticism. The Treasury has been turned into a docile tool, rather than subjecting the Chancellor’s ideas to rigorous, if private, scrutiny and challenge. This has led to schemes being rushed into existence before the means have been put in place to deliver them- tax credits notably.
But more than Brown’s actions what has infuriated colleagues is his silences. His non-solidarity with Blair in moments when the PM has come under heavy party criticism has been expressed through those long, sultry, glowering silences. He waited seven days – as long as God took to create the world- before denying his sponsorship of the attacks on the Prime Minister. Not many Labour MPs believe him.
His opponents fear that in No 10 he would deliver more of the same- the same obsessive garnering of all authority to himself; the same closetness. His brooding shadow has weighed upon the entire Blair premiership: could anyone emerge from it in a Brown premiership?
There has always been a hard core of ABGers – Anyone But Gordon. Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers are its founder members. Neither look plausible challengers. Within the Cabinet John Reid has a certain brute strength and Alan Johnson an easy charm and affability. But Reid has never been in any job long enough to be able to assess whether he is a seriously heavy hitter and Johnson is relatively inexperienced at the top level.
Up to now the Blairies main aim has seemed to be to nail Brown’s feet firmly to the deck of New Labour in the belief that he was unstoppable in the leadership stakes. They fear that Brown remains fundamentally a believer in state action. Now they wonder whether Brown has alienated enough of the middle ground to make a leadership challenge to him plausible.
The Left already has a candidate in the shape of John McDonnell. If the Blairites want to stop Brown reneging on the Prime Minister’s vision of a mixed economy in public services with a growing role for private sector delivery the Left has precisely the opposite vision. They hold to the old Fabian ideal that state-delivered, centrally-controlled services are the only way to achieve the dream of a more equal society that made them socialists.
Blair won his elections by enticing the middle classes into his silken web of charm and talking the language of opportunity and choice. Brown will never have the charm but he should certainly have the political sense to realise that any Labour leader who surrenders the middle ground to a resurgent Tory party under a charismatic young iconoclastic leader (who seems to dislike his party almost as much as Blair dislikes the Labour Party) is hell-bent on suicide.
It used to be said that Brown could never deliver a killer blow to Blair without destroying the party he wished to inherit. The important thing now is that the Chancellor stands accused of setting loose the dogs of war. Gordon Brown has made sure that when he does become Prime Minister – as he is still odds-on to do- he, like Tony Blair, will always know that there is an enemy within.
© Yorkshire Post
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