It’s a funny old thing, the Labour party. For ten years it tolerated Tony Blair, hoping that if it put up with him long enough, it would get the leader it really wanted. Naturally, it also assumed that this would entail having the best bits of Mr Blair (winning) without the war-mongering, populist, slippery, free-market parts. Go Gordon!
Well we know what happened next. Mr Brown enjoyed the shortest honeymoon since Ian McEwan’s uptight couple failed to get it together at Chesil Beach. A slew of bad luck and bad management combined to change his image from proud Atlas, on whose shoulders the British economy could rest secure, to Mr Bean, wrecking everything he touches.
One eminent New Labourite describes a conversation this week in a shoe-repair bar in which the man at the lathe reeled off sundry complaints about the state of the nation above the din and concluded, ‘What do you expect? It’s Brownland innit?’
Brownland has reached that state of generalised disaffection where everything that goes wrong, from the impact of oil price rises to floundering banks and street stabbings falls indiscriminately on the man in Number 10.
Take the fuss over the PM’s ‘cold calls’ to members of the public, widely mocked as a counsel of pleading despair. I had one of those ghostly memories that Mr Blair was not above a bit of chat with Acacia Avenue when he was in the top job and cold-called two of his former aides to check. One said that his old boss had refrained from doing so because it was gimmicky. There’s hindsight for you. The other replied that he had indeed made occasional discreet personal calls in reply to letters which he had read and which touched him.
Both agreed that the real error was in the timing and place of it becoming public: in PRWeek, of all places. No evidence exists whatsoever for the PM making any unsolicited calls at 6 a.m., a detail guaranteed to provoke derision. A senior Number 10 insider who knows his diary says, ‘For one thing, I am sure the system wouldn’t allow it and it would be discourteous. He simply wouldn’t do that.’
The interesting thing is that a story which stretches credibility should be so widely believed and repeated simply because Mr Brown attracts bad coverage and does not get the benefit of the doubt on anything. Until he can change that, he is in no position to stem the more serious problem, that what he says is routinely discounted simply because it is him saying it.
Still, Mr Brown has one quality his detractors are apt to understate, namely stamina. Not that you would believe it from the relentless overpolling of the citizenry, but there is not an election this year, nor even next.
In the days when all the fashionable talk was of an early election, Peter Mandelson flattened the idea, telling someone who suggested it, ‘I’ve known Gordon for more than 20 years and I can tell you that the date of the election will be May 2010.’ He is even more likely to be proved right after recent events — a long game is the only hope against fleet-footed David Cameron.
On this hopeful theory, Mr Brown may be bruised, battered, disliked, mocked and squashed by a runaway train at Crewe, but the Tories have peaked early and will have trouble holding such a commanding lead for so long. The opportunity of a Churchillian fightback against the odds is tantalising for a party whose favourite breed is the underdog.
I’d say that was not so much Brownland as Dreamland. New Labour is a weakened organism, beset by internal fractures and disappointments as well as fatigue. Still, the wishful thinking that its leader will be whooshed out of office looks just that for the moment. As MPs returned to Westminster this week, the sense is of a lull, rather than gathering momentum to unseat him.
If he wins the vote on 42-day terror detentions next week, he will have secured what his lieutenants call a ‘psychological victory’. It is of course remarkable that the Prime Minister should be defining as a victory the securing of a mere 14-day advance on the existing terror laws at a time of high risk. In his present position, though, any sign that he can prevail in an argument (as he did on the embryology bill) lessens the risk of a quick challenge. The words ‘won’ and ‘Gordon’ are what his strategists want to hear in one sentence.
Short-term battles can be turned round. The deeper unease is that while Labour may not find a way to get rid of Mr Brown, it is no longer sure why it wants him, or indeed what it wants at all.
One minute it is damning the Tories for their obsession with tax cuts. Now the pressure from ministers is for a tax cut of their own to take the pressure off voters’ finances — just at the point where the money has been spent several times over to alleviate the 10p tax band fiasco.
‘I’m way beyond feeling any sympathy or anger,’ one party insider tells me. ‘I don’t feel anything about him any more except that he can’t win and what should we do about it?’
A landslide Gordon defeat would indeed wipe out so many seats that the Jam generation (those politicians reared on 1980s music) would immediately become the lost generation.
Such a deathly calculation is not lost on the young pretenders. The obvious hopeful, David Miliband, is beginning to be seen as vacillating about his own intentions. From what I know of him, he isn’t dithering at all. Indeed he is considerably warmer about the prospect since getting a taste of the higher ministerial air as Foreign Secretary. Nonetheless, neither he nor his supporters is prepared to risk the inevitable bloodbath which would follow a defenestration of a sitting Prime Minister. To say nothing of the need to build up a stronger base among his colleagues if he is to avoid becoming a factional Blairite candidate.
Meanwhile, James Purnell, the self-aware Work and Pensions Secretary, first tipped in this magazine as a contender, is currently focusing more on trying to persuade Mr Brown to change his message than garnering support to unseat him. He is known to favour a renewed focus on school standards to reassure middle-class parents, rather than arguments about who gets which state schools places (an argument launched by the Education Secretary Ed Balls).
Other young Cabinet ministers are calling for broader change to the prime ministerial image, from distant authority figure to hands-on problem solver. ‘Our strategy has completely failed to engage with how people feel,’ says one. ‘We can’t go on just telling them how lucky they are to have had Gordon at the helm when they are furious with us.’
The mood in the ministerial ranks is thus cautionary, even probationary. Unable to bring themselves to ditch their leader, they gamble that reprogramming him will make the difference. How many of them are confident that this will work is another matter entirely.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of the London Evening Standard.