Imagine the scene. A Cabinet mutiny, detonated by Wednesday’s e-grenade from Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, brings a Labour leadership contest. As January ends (having implausibly fast-forwarded the party’s laborious selection procedure) yet another unelected Labour leader sets off for Buckingham Palace to kiss hands.
February is now upon us, and in April Parliament is to be dissolved for a general election. As the pantechnicon drives up Downing Street carrying Harriet Harman’s, Alan Johnson’s, Jack Straw’s or David Miliband’s belongings, press cameras snap.
Captions please.
“No need to unpack — I’ll kip on the sofa”; “If today’s Tuesday, this must be Downing Street”; “Where’s my sleeping bag”; “Here today” ...
What a fantastical notion. Who can seriously think that if, so close to an election, our Prime Minister had been forced out by vengeful colleagues, and a HarStrawMiliJohnson had moved into Downing Street to form a new Cabinet for the last few weeks as Gordon Brown crashed around outside the stockade like a maddened rogue elephant, that this could have boosted Labour’s electoral chances?
The entire nation would have sucked its teeth in disbelief. You’ll hardly find a commentator with a lower opinion of Mr Brown than me, so if even I can see that removing him now would only compound Labour’s problems, don’t imagine his own MPs cannot see the same. And don’t imagine that this never occurred to Geoff Hoon or Patricia Hewitt.
In which case, we must face the truth. Mainly they wanted to hurt him. Two senior Labour figures preparing to depart politics have delivered a huge kick to the prime-ministerial shins. Now, we may suppose — Lord Mandelson permitting — that Mr Brown will limp on to the defeat that the British voters wait to inflict upon him.
This new year putsch against Mr Brown, then, has succeeded. Mr Hoon’s and Ms Hewitt’s Night of the Long Icicles has achieved its purpose once you understand its purpose.
Indeed, once you understand its purpose, you see that it couldn’t fail. Mr Hoon and Ms Hewitt cannot possibly have believed their letter calling for a secret ballot of the Parliamentary Party was likely to accomplish its stated aim. There was never much prospect of a ballot and, had there been one, Mr Brown would anyway have won, messily, in scenes of damaging confusion.
There did, perhaps, exist a speculative hope that the letter might trigger a Cabinet rebellion, from which a challenger might have emerged — probably David Miliband. But in the contest that would have followed, Mr Brown would have won through, messily, in scenes of damaging confusion.
And the most likely outcome of all (given Mr Miliband’s habit, at key moments, of imitating a lettuce) was that the rebels would wilt away, concluding that it was too late. Mr Brown’s senior colleagues would savour his agonies for an afternoon, damning him with faint praise, then allow him to win through, messily, in scenes of damaging confusion. That is what happened.
All this, Mr Hoon and Ms Hewitt will have guessed. Maybe it was just possible to dream about a Plan A: some Archangel Gabriel elbowing Mr Brown aside to sweep Labour to victory. But, being unacquainted with anyone answering that description among the ranks of their senior colleagues, they would never have pulled the pin on the grenade unless Plan B was good enough. Plan B was that Mr Brown would in the end win through, messily, in scenes of damaging confusion.
However their attempted putsch worked out, Mr Brown would get hurt. That was all they knew, and all they needed to know. Such, reader (for you really do deserve to be let in on this secret), is the near-incoherent rage that the PM has by now inspired among so many of those who have worked with or for him. We are sometimes too clever by half in divining the supposedly devilish motives of politicians. Revenge alone may explain all, and revenge is sweet.
At this point it’s worth a closer look at Mr Hoon and Ms Hewitt. When unexciting people move against you, the response “Oh, these are unexciting people” may miss the point. That they are unexceptional should be a matter for alarm, not relief. Stirred not least by whisperings from the usual quarters, some media commentary is describing both as washed-up third-raters. They are not. They are dependable second-raters, relatively young, with decent careers outside politics in their sights, hailing from a period of British history in which first-raters have been rare, third-raters common and even fourth-raters have risen effortlessly into the Cabinet.
Ms Hewitt was a moderately modernising Health Secretary who managed a tough job at least competently for some years: loyal, cautious and by no means a stirrer. Mr Hoon was a better Defence Secretary than some of his dismal successors, an emollient and unobtrusive Chief Whip at a difficult time, and on the airwaves a gutsy batsman on a succession of sticky wickets of his own Prime Ministers’ creation. This pair are downbeats, not deadbeats. They were useful senior colleagues.
Ms Hewitt no longer has anything to gain or lose from a Brown Government and has been energetically pursuing a business career. If Mr Hoon wanted a life peerage in Mr Brown’s resignation honours list, we can assume he had despaired of the hope — perhaps when the Prime Minister shafted his ambitions for a European Commissioner’s post, or perhaps after his brush with Commons expenses stories. So Mr Hoon, too, had nothing left to gain or lose from Mr Brown.
In at least this sense, the matter of self-promotion, both Mr Hoon and Ms Hewitt can be called disinterested parties. When even people like that are trying to kill you, you do, as a Prime Minister, have a problem.
I have a hunch that we have not heard the last of this. When it came it took me so completely unawares that I’m now inclined to be more, not less, twitchy about the possibility of something further spoiling our predictions. So I’ll hold back from concluding that Mr Brown’s path to the starting blocks of a general election will now be smooth, and last Wednesday was the final big wobble.
We didn’t predict this one and we may not be expecting the next. There are people around the Prime Minister whom I should be surprised to see follow him, uncomplaining, into oblivion: fighters, not quitters. They may yet ambush him. Perhaps Ms Hewitt’s and Mr Hoon’s real impertinence was to suppose that they could usurp that privilege.
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Matthew Parris joined The Times as parliamentary sketchwriter in 1988, a role he held until 2001. He had formerly worked for the Foreign Office and been a Conservative MP from 1979-86. He has published many books on travel and politics and an autobiography, Chance Witness. In 2005 he won the Orwell Prize for Journalism. His diary appears in The Times on Thursdays, and his Opinion column on Saturdays
The Editor of the TLS writes on books, people and politics
Mary Beard of Cambridge and the TLS on culture ancient and modern
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