Ignorance, wrote Darwin, "more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge". No one with a profound understanding of economics and the world financial system would argue that David Cameron and George Osborne know more than Gordon Brown about how to run the economy in the best interests of Britain. At the height of the financial crisis last autumn, when Mr Brown moved boldly to recapitalise our failing banks and successfully put the case for more active, interventionist government during deep recession, the Conservatives displayed dismal judgement. They opposed fiscal stimulus and, true to their Thatcherite inheritance, announced that the management of the economy should be through interest rates alone. They have also since opposed the policy of quantitative easing. And we still do not know, as David Blanchflower writes on page 19, what their policy for avoiding the greater recession would have been. Yet ignorance begets more confidence, and the Conservatives are positioned to win the next general election.
This, above all else, is of course a political failure for Labour and the Prime Minister. He has none of the gifts of verbal fluency of his Conservative rival, David Cameron; none of the gifts of "connection" with the wider electorate that Tony Blair had. He is highly intelligent but has little practical intelligence: that intuitive gift of knowing how to react in the right way in any given situation. Instead, he equivocates, agonises, retracts, reverses. He is in power, but too often not in control.
Yet there was something moving about Brown's performance at the Labour party conference in Brighton. Delivering his final conference speech as leader before the election, he was like a great warrior-king who knew that, after more than a decade of imperious rule, and having once been master of all he surveyed ("I have abolished boom and bust!"), the end was near. He was defiant: he would fight on to the last. The Prime Minister is nothing if not fanatically resilient and stubborn - a stubbornness that is rooted in his unforgiving Presbyterian inheritance. He believes that, in trying to harness free markets in the interests of fairness and greater equality, in indulging the City and a deregulated banking system while redistributing largely by stealth, he was doing the right thing. Few in his own party now believe that to be so.
Much of the chatter in Brighton was once more of whether there would be one final attempt to oust Mr Brown before the end of the year. The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, may have told our political correspondent, James Macintyre, that the leadership question had been resolved once and for all, but it has not. The deep fear within Labour is that the Tories will win by a substantial majority at the election and then - by reforming political party funding, which would break the link between Labour and the unions, and by redrawing constituency boundaries that are at present skewed in favour of Labour, and finally by making a possible constitutional settlement with the Scottish National Party that would break the Union - fix their hold on power for a generation or more. But it is as if the party has been immobilised by this fear, all confidence gone.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives gather in Manchester knowing that the election is theirs to lose. There is no great nationwide enthusiasm for David Cameron and his team. They are ahead in the polls merely because they are not Labour and have, on the whole, successfully decontaminated the Tory brand. The extremity of their proposed policies on the economy and Europe has not been subjected to prolonged scrutiny by a compliant media, and the party's chief funders remain shadowy and rather sinister. Instead, the BBC's unctuous and ubiquitous Andrew Marr asks the Prime Minister, disgracefully, whether he takes antidepressants, and our public culture is degraded just that little bit more.
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