No, since you ask, he wasn’t drunk. I read with some interest that the former Home Secretary had been on the sauce when he told me that the Chancellor’s behaviour last week had been ‘absolutely stupid’ and attacked his suitability for the leadership.
Like Shakespeare’s Menenius, Mr Clarke is well-known as a politician who ‘loves a cup of hot wine/ with not a drop of allaying Tiber in’t’, but on late Thursday morning when we sat down to discuss the revolt against Mr Blair and its consequences, he didn’t touch a drop. What he was doing was something altogether more calculated and dangerous than lashing out after a drink. He was consciously putting on to the agenda one of the most dangerous challenges for a politician — a question mark over his character.
This is not like the routine business of having views and competences put under the microscope. If you are accused of being insufficiently ‘New’ Labour, you can emphasise your devotion to the modernisation of the party, as the Chancellor did with Andrew Marr on BBC television on Sunday. If you are dubbed insufficiently reformist by the Old Believer Byers–Milburn sect, you can wax lyrical about a ‘New Individualism’ and promise to embrace a wide coalition of influences.
But if the charge raised is simply, ‘There is something badly wrong with you, mate,’ then the response is more difficult. That is why those who most intensely dislike and distrust the Chancellor focus so intently on the question of what he is ‘really’ like rather than sundry other disagreements.
And with some justification. What Mr Clarke said could not really be dismissed as only the sour outpourings of a sacked Cabinet minister. There have long been uncertainties at the top of the Labour party about what the Chancellor would be like to work with, and how his personality would play in an electoral era when the ability to articulate national emotion and aspiration comfortably is part of the package.
That Mr Brown is aware of the significance of the character attack is beyond doubt. His entire BBC interview was calibrated to emphasise his soft and forgiving qualities. ‘Gordon has been to nice-school,’ noted one backbencher.
His ‘moral compass’, his refusal to ‘pass by on the other side’ and his desire to give just about everyone in the Labour party a role in shaping a Brown administration were on display. One vaguely Brownite minister said that he ‘choked on his Weetabix’ when Mr Brown told Mr Marr that he wanted an ‘incredibly inclusive’ debate about policy and direction. Incredible is the word for it: inclusivity has not been Mr Brown’s forte.
A niggling question about personality cannot, however, be answered by merely proving that you are, on a good day, a nice human being. The rapid rise of baby Fraser to prominence in the Chancellor’s rhetoric as proof of his humanity is beside the point. By the time his misplaced grin on the day of Mr Blair’s meltdown had been explained away by claiming that he had been fondly reminiscing about his offspring — and after the infant popped up again as the reason for the chief plotter Tom Watson visiting Mr Brown at home, I had begun to conclude that baby Fraser was behind the whole thing. A Pampers plot to topple Tony.
The Chancellor’s core problem is not that he is awkward or not as demonstrative as the thespian Tony Blair — we could learn to live with and even appreciate the contrast. It is the view that he is hell-bent on grasping the crown at whatever cost to himself and others. He stands accused, like Gollum, of being corrupted by the intensity of his quest for the Ring.
And his character is genuinely complex —even his friends talk about a chiaroscuro mixture. He can be, as Robert Harris unkindly put it, ‘barely socially functional’ one minute and deeply interested in (some) other people the next. He lacks that hardest thing to achieve by effort, namely ease. And yet, as anyone who has experienced the beam of his attention will testify, when Mr Brown’s interest is engaged he is enjoyable and rewarding company.
The most satisfactory conversation I have ever sustained with him was, in effect, a lengthy tutorial on how he saw the potential and limits of the market in public service reform (yep, it was a wild night out in the Treasury). In it, he ranged over his speeches with a grasp of detail that was truly impressive. Unlike Mr Blair, he is widely read, though I do wonder what it would take to change his mind on any issue of substance, since he has a tendency towards the idée fixe.
Tony Blair profited from his character being unmasked gradually before us. As a veteran of opposition and government, Gordon does not have that luxury. The PM’s character has stood the test of office rather well in that he is genuinely considered benign, if no longer always right. It is his judgment that has been in question, more than his personality. Yet to those he has dispensed with, ‘nice’ Mr Blair can be utterly ruthless. ‘It is like having the light turned off and finding yourself in a dark cellar with the key thrown away’ is the description of one ally who outlived his usefulness.
But fate dictates that it is Mr Brown who labours now under the ‘character question’ — a sudden import from US politics where the issue looms large in any presidential race and where there is far more detailed study of its impact on voters’ behaviour. Huge effort goes into ensuring that a candidate avoids the appearance of strain or anger.
The annoying part for Mr Brown is that Mr Clarke and others are setting him a test which they can always say he has failed to satisfy. One No. 10 aide already says that to show inclusivity he must go further than just ‘cuddling backbenchers and having a makeover’. Meaning? ‘Ruling out promoting any of the plotters in his first Cabinet and showing that he really intends to co-opt all the talents — not just the Blairites-for-Brown.’ Another adds that to show that he is truly collegiate, Mr Brown would have to open up discussion of his forthcoming spending review. Now that really is a Gordon unthinkable.
I am not at all sure if Mr Brown’s moral compass will be able to cope with all these demands. It is a tall order for any politician, let alone one of 55, to be asked in near-triumph to provide such a rampant show of humility. Far more likely, the bitter internal argument will move to whether he has satisfied the requirement to be ‘really’ new leaf, followed by growing irritation in the Brown camp that a busted flush of a prime minister should be setting tests for his successor.
Yet like it or not, ‘How Do You Solve a Problem like Gordon?’ is set for a run on the Labour stage. Meanwhile, the battle-weary troops in No. 10 are entertaining themselves with this joke: how many psychotherapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: just one, but the lightbulb really has to want to change. That is the question, really.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of the London Evening Standard.