As a man forever burnishing his intellectual credentials, Gordon Brown will be aware of Karl Marx’s merry quip that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The prime minister is once more in deep, deep trouble for exactly the same reasons he was teetering on the brink in September last year. This time, however, his predicament is being greeted by his own side with scornful laughter as well as despair.
Ken Livingstone, the puckish former London mayor, jokes that “all the party are united, he’s doomed”. In the Commons, Alan Simpson brandished a bath plug, claiming Jacqui Smith’s expenses scandal had distracted from the real business of politics. In the same debate Gordon Prentice lambasted the prime minister’s “horrible” video appeal via the youthful YouTube website for MPs’ allowances to be reformed.
Humour in politics is a serious business indeed. John Redwood, the Tory challenger to John Major, never lived down the film of his attempt to sing the Welsh national anthem in the native tongue. Likewise the prime minister’s YouTube performance has now been set to techno music with grotesque results: Pinocchio goes punk.
A brace of very serious former home secretaries have weighed in. David Blunkett, who would perhaps enjoy a second cabinet recall, warns: “We cannot afford civil war”, so raising the spectre of it. Charles Clarke, another former leader of that ill-fated department and an outspoken enemy, says he is “ashamed” to be a member of his party after the Smeargate e-mail operation mounted from No 10 against David Cameron and George Osborne.
None of these men reflects the solid centre of the parliamentary Labour party, Brown’s allies argue. But John Major’s awful last years were also bedevilled by just such stories about his loss of authority. A gang of swivel-eyed Euro-sceptics and malcontents paraded their contempt for their leader on a daily rent-a-quote basis. Then as now we knew that all the way up to cabinet level, powerful “bastards” (as Major called them) agreed with the barmy army’s analysis, although they were unprepared to go public. When John McFall, Brown’s ally on the Treasury committee, concedes that Blunkett is right to point out the prime minister needs “a longer-term vision”, No 10 knows that even his friends are having a wobble.
The extraordinary circumstances of the great recession gave the prime minister a healthy charge of power. He was reenergised. But now it’s all about “brownouts” – which the dictionary helpfully defines as a drop in the voltage of electrical supply; applied medically, a dimming of the vision or tunnel vision. The Brownouts keep coming.
After Smeargate, once again an apology had to be dragged unwillingly out of the prime minister. Another former minister, Stephen Byers, pointed out last week how typical was his “tactical” and “cynical” manoeuvring to put David Cameron on the spot over his proposal to tax the rich in the budget. This wasn’t a revenue-raising exercise at all, or an appeal to national solidarity in a time of crisis, but a clumsy trap for Tories. The voters are unimpressed.
There was more dimming of vision as Brown tried to bounce the opposition into new rules on MPs’ expenses without proper consultation. Were they ever going to sign up to a deal to pay politicians for merely turning up to do their jobs? As for the Gurkhas, for 30p Brown could have picked up a tabloid paper to see which way the wind was blowing. If The Sun and Daily Mail were actually advocating immigration for “our heroes”, then the barometer was showing a gale.
Yes, we are almost back to the bad old days of last summer, when the botched abolition of the 10p tax band – some low earners still haven’t been compensated for their loss – and the Tory by-election victory in the formerly safe Labour seat of Crewe and Nantwich caused near mutiny. Labour MPs of the left, right and disaffected centre will be talking this week about whether another attempt should be made to force the PM out.
The electoral arithmetic is straightforward. On a poll of polls the Tories have a 15% lead over Labour and are set for a 104-seat majority. MPs like Frank Field who have never concealed their opposition to Brown think a stop-the-rot candidate could still limit the damage. A 5.2% swing would make the Conservatives the largest party after the election – a loss of roughly 68 Labour seats with majorities of less than about 4,000. However, it requires a 6.8% swing for David Cameron to win outright. Labour MPs sitting on slender but not hopeless majorities of 4,000 and 6,000 have all to play for.
Last year a young candidate in the mould of David Cameron or Nick Clegg was the order of the day. The foreign secretary David Miliband was then the danger man. The chief assassin is once again posited as wily old Jack Straw, the justice minister. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, however, is to be the beneficiary of a coup this time. Everyone likes him, goes the logic.
A few important details remain to be cleared up. Johnson is more reluctant Brutus than envious Cassius: he will have to be elevated by acclamation. Straw, as last year, might well ask why he should pull another man’s chestnuts out of the fire. If the cabinet bottled it then, why should it not now? Left and right wings have failed to unite before too. A tiny minority believes Brown may decide to quit of his own accord. Was that a pig that just flew past my window?
The otherwise irrelevant European parliamentary elections on June 4 are the moment of truth. Labour polled a miserable 23% last time round, the Liberal Democrats a poor 15%. If the Lib Dems run Labour close, or worse still if the neo-fascist BNP runs Labour a close fourth and the Lib Dems move into second place, then revolt will follow, goes the theory. But it is getting perilously close to a general election.
Last time round it was the normally quiet women of the Blairite wing of the party who nearly did for Brown. They went public with their opposition in September, in order to provoke a cabinet putsch. In a brilliant coup de théâtre, the PM welcomed back Peter Mandelson into cabinet while the near collapse of western capitalism made his experience temporarily indispensable.
Today the prime minister seeks salvation in his handling of the economy. The massive injection of state capital into the economies of the developed world will slowly bear fruit in recovery. Consumer confidence is picking up, though he avoids talk of the green shoots of recovery. He believes the world is on the verge of decades of high growth and wants to contrast his “politics of growth and opportunity” against Tory pessimism about the future. By this time next year he thinks he will have a good story to tell.
On the big decisions – as in preparations for a flu pandemic – he believes the government has got it right, though he will attempt to show he has more forward thinking to offer with a series of speeches in coming weeks on crime, education and health. But that’s what he promised after Crewe too.
One prominent critic scoffs: “He is terrified of the unions and the party over public service reform. At this time you must start bush fires, not hose them down.” Yet the prime minister is hosing down Peter Mandelson’s little fire under the Royal Mail. Privatisation in any form is now ruled out as too controversial. Where are the cuts needed to put our finances in shape?
Blair, for all his faults, actually stood and fought for something. “Phoney Tony” firmly believed in a liberal interventionist foreign policy and belatedly swung his authority behind public service reform. Even Mandelson fought hard for Britain’s integration into Europe and, thankfully, lost. Brown needs to show his beliefs are not just so much bargain-basement Machiavellianism. But this has been said often before. It’s becoming a farce.
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