Deep party feuds never really die: they just lie buried under the flimsy covering of the good times. For Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, such times have been brief indeed. My yoga teacher tells her wobbly pupils that the point of balance in a perfect headstand is the point just before we fall over. Mr Brown has discovered this goes for politics too.
Not least among his many horrors in a parliamentary session overwhelmed by a building society crisis, carelessly lost confidential files, inaccurate data on foreign workers and the funding scandal from hell, is the return of negative comparisons with his predecessor.
As soon as I heard people close to the PM saying at Labour conference, ‘Who really misses Blair now?’, I knew fate was being sorely tempted. Now the murmurs about ‘How Tony would have handled this’ buzz unfavourably around Mr Brown in his time of troubles. That is a golden glow too far. Had dear Tony lived politically to see this scandal, there is no question what he would have had to do: namely resign. He could not have survived another dodgy funding saga, whatever the excuses.
Mr Brown knows this. That is why he calculated that his best chances of dealing with this latest and worst mess to land on the No. 10 doormat is to locate it way back (in government terms) in 2003 and have Jack Straw opine that it was ‘a matter of history’ that it started life in the nice and sleazy era of You Know Who.
Factually, Messrs Brown and Straw are right. Whether it was a clever or considered thing to say so, I doubt. The washing of hands has unleashed a behind-the-scenes bout of Blairite fury which is still capable of doing damage to Mr Brown. This row provides a connecter between the two regimes — and not as they would wish.
For a start, if there really had been the ‘stable and orderly transition’, rather than a sullen protracted farewell held together with sticky tape and forced grins all round, the matter of how to avoid a rerun of any embarrassments after the loans-for-honours scandal would have been settled. It was not.
It also reminds us of the things Labour has so far been too polite to discuss: like Mr Brown’s role in party matters for the last decade. One former chairman told me that he was pretty sure the then Chancellor knew nothing at all of any trickery about donations and the bewildering range of identities adopted by Mr Abrahams. ‘Not for any edifying reason,’ he says. ‘Gordon never took any interest in what happened in the party. He didn’t even attend gala dinners when we asked him. He was above it all. If the machine wasn’t directly serving him or his interests, he wasn’t remotely interested in it.’
On one point at least, the Brownites are right to point the finger at their predecessors. The Blair years saw an extraordinary instability in the way the Labour party was run. It veered, as one former high-level insider put it, ‘between being a delivery unit for whatever No. 10 wanted, to brief periods of more independence and then back again — all against a background of decline that comes with long periods in office’.
Inconsistency in such matters was very typical of Mr Blair. So Charles Clarke’s appointment after the 2001 election as chairman was intended to give the party the sense that it was important enough to merit a major figure at the helm. That did not last long. The low calibre of Mr Clarke’s successor as chairman, Mr Ian McCartney, a Prescott ally from the Scottish party machine, was widely remarked upon even then. After Mr McCartney, it returned to appointing apparatchiks.
Many of those I have spoken to who worked in senior positions feel that Mr Brown’s summary firing of the General Secretary Peter Watt without an investigation was unfair and would rebound on him. This scandal flows, as one put it, ‘from the desire of politicians to have the money flow in, but not to get involved in how that happens’. That does not make them less responsible.
For many years I wondered whether the state of the Labour party mattered at all. It seemed to manage perfectly well — sporadically active at election times, churning out unreadable guff in-between. If Mr Watt sent out badly written emails, one of which managed to mangle Mr Blair’s Fettes-honed grammar beyond recognition, then so what? The show stayed quite nicely on the road.
It turns out it did matter. The party ended up as the unloved child of the Blair–Brown divorce. Neither of its warring parents took custody. That is why, whoever ends up carrying the can for the rule-breaking, they are both guilty — of rank neglect, at the very least.
Lack of any recognition of co-responsibility from Mr Brown is what is really rankling with his ancestral enemies. ‘That will return to haunt him,’ says one with the kind of menace that bides its time.
Charles Clarke, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers are not individually great forces. Yet they can very easily become a danger to the PM if they speak out collectively for the centre-right of the party when Mr Brown is at a nadir. The lowest point has not been reached yet. I gather that Messrs Clarke and Milburn will not be reviving the 20/20 website devoted to alternative New Labour thinking (alternative to Gordon, obviously), which would be a declaration of war. Alas for Labour, there is no settled peace. That uncertainty is Mr Brown’s worst harvest. He has spent all these years plotting to become the unassailable leader, only to become a vulnerable one.
This isn’t just about the Old Believers. The ministers who look most ill at ease these days are those of previously Blairite inclination on whom the PM relies to prove that he is not running a narrow, sectarian government. So the chief whip, Geoff Hoon, ends up lawyering away on some point about Mr Abrahams’s relationship with the fundraiser Jon Mendelsohn, of which he could have no certain knowledge — and being confounded.
Some of the sons-of-Blair are miscast under Mr Brown even without this trauma: the engaging Andy Burnham does not look or sound right on the (startlingly under-par) Treasury team. Liam Byrne, battling away as immigration minister, the toughest job under Cabinet level, finds himself heaved on to TV at No. 10’s behest to sound upright about the donor issue. As hardly anyone outside Westminster yet knows who Mr Byrne is, he cannot carry a message of loyalty and reassurance with much conviction.
For now, the usual suspects we might expect to shout ‘Told you so!’ remain quiet. Mr Milburn indulged in a little light sermonising in the Sunday Times about the dangers of old leaders with no fresh ideas — and yes, of course, he meant Australia’s fallen hero, John Howard. Well, what were you thinking? Others fulminate privately, but fear being the ones to bring the curse of disunity down upon the party.
It would be a miracle if this state of affairs were to last. There is too much ill feeling pent up. ‘The past is not dead,’ says a character in a Faulkner play. ‘It’s not even past.’ As the excavations into Donorgate II begin, the Labour party is about to find out just how true that is.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor and columnist of the London Evening Standard.
In Peter Oborne’s political column last week David Abrahams’s name was incorrectly given as Peter Abrahams.