Who killed the British prime minister?
The Economist | September 14, 2006
IF THE old saw is true that elections are not won by oppositions but lost by
governments, the events of the past fortnight must have made David Cameron,
the leader of Britain's Conservatives, a happy man. In that time he has seen
the most potent election-winner in Labour's history—someone senior Tories
still admit they do not know how to beat—humiliatingly reduced to something
close to irrelevance. He has also seen Tony Blair's probable successor
stained with dishonour and a once-disciplined party suffer a collective
nervous breakdown. If nothing else, when Mr Cameron greets his troops at
their conference next month they will know they chose a very lucky general.
Mr Cameron can claim at least some of the credit for Labour's
self-destructive frenzy. Since becoming Tory leader last December his
strategy has been to remake the Conservative Party into one that uncommitted
voters no longer find out-of-touch, uncaring and repellent. When not hugging
trees or hoodies, Mr Cameron talks about social justice and nurturing
communities, and castigates businesses that fail to meet the highest ethical
standards. Under his guidance, the Tories have stopped seeking to exploit
fears about immigration and promising tax cuts at the expense of cherished
public services. Despite some mockery, his approach has worked well enough
to give the Tories their first sustained lead in the opinion polls since
1992.
That is part of the reason for the panic that has gripped Labour, putting
pressure on Mr Blair to say when he would honour his pledge to step down
from his job well before the next general election. The scales were tipped
by the release of a letter on September 6th signed by 15 MPs pressing him
for a departure date, followed by half of them resigning their various
junior government posts. Mr Blair then said he would not be in office in a
year's time.
Why the panic? One of Mr Blair's unusual achievements was to have kept his
party ahead in the polls, almost without interruption, for the best part of
nine years in government. A consequence is that Labour MPs have become
spoilt by this easy ascendancy. Under Margaret Thatcher Tory MPs grew
hardened to much greater mid-term unpopularity, confident that the
persuasiveness of Conservative ideas and the feebleness of the opposition
would mean that their fortunes would recover when it mattered, at election
time.
But the current crop of Labour MPs, particularly the younger ones, have not
learned to be resilient in the face of hard pounding. It was significant
that the 15 signatories of the rude letter to Mr Blair were all from the
2001 intake. In their eyes, although no general election need be called for
three years, a Tory lead that has yet to touch double figures in any
mainstream poll spells disaster.
Labour has other reasons too, however, to be rid of its leader. Mr Blair has
never been loved by his followers. When they chose him in 1994 they did so
only because, after 15 years in fractious opposition, the party was
desperate for power and realistic enough to see that Mr Blair was the man to
provide it. Since then, as part of his "project" to make Labour the dominant
electoral force in British politics, Mr Blair has repeatedly challenged the
party's collectivist instincts. He has done so by ruling out punitive tax
rates and embarking on a long campaign to revitalise the public services
with money (which Labour likes) and market-based reforms (which it does
not).
The unloved asset
For as long as Mr Blair was seen by his party as an indispensable electoral
asset, he held sway over it. But these days many believe he has become an
electoral liability. That is partly because all political leaders, as Mr
Blair acknowledges, eventually reach a best-before date. Mostly, however, he
has been dished by Iraq and by his uncritical intimacy with a much-loathed
American president.
The sight of Mr Blair at the G8 meeting of rich-country leaders in July
playing the fawning courtier to George Bush was too much for many Labour MPs.
The impulse that last week turned revulsion into action came from his
failure in July to join other European leaders in demanding an immediate
ceasefire, as Israeli bombers pulverised southern Lebanon. This encapsulated
everything about his foreign policy that makes his MPs squirm.
Coincidentally, Mr Cameron this week argued for a "rebalancing" of the
special relationship and a friendship with America that was "solid, but not
slavish".
It is not the war in Iraq itself, divisive though that was for Labour, or
even the non-existence of the oft-cited weapons of mass destruction that has
done the greatest harm to Mr Blair; it is the culpable lack of post-war
planning, the ghastliness of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the relentlessness
of the bad news and the utter lack of contrition. Mr Blair may believe it is
still too soon to judge the success of what is being attempted in Iraq, but
his party holds him personally responsible for what many regard as the
greatest debacle in British foreign policy since Suez, 50 years ago. It is a
measure of Mr Blair's isolation that he admits to having been surprised by
the backlash over Lebanon, but he is unrepentant, convinced that popular
opinion simply misjudges the scale of the threat from Islamist terrorism.
His defiance—he says these issues are "non-negotiable"—is seen by many MPs
as a continuing provocation to the party and its supporters.
For a few, the deep embarrassment of a party-finance scandal has provided a
further reason for Mr Blair's removal. In his long-running battle to reduce
the influence of the unions, Labour's traditional paymasters, Mr Blair hoped
that the subscriptions of ordinary party members and the donations of the
rich, gratified by the government's pro-business stance, would reduce the
party's dependence on organised workers. But as party membership fell (in
part because of Iraq), the reliance on rich individuals increased. For most
of the past year the police have been investigating the possibility that
peerages have been offered in exchange for loans. The awful, though remote,
possibility hangs over the prime minister of leaving Downing Street in the
back of a police car.
If those were the immediate causes of the attempt by a section of his party
to bring down the prime minister, it still does not provide quite the whole
explanation. Mr Blair had given private assurances to close colleagues,
including the chancellor, Gordon Brown, that he would be off by next summer.
Why then risk the certain collateral damage that a putsch would cause to
bundle Mr Blair out of office a few months early? And was Mr Brown, if not
pulling the strings of the rebellion, acquiescent in it?
Last weekend Mr Brown claimed that he had given the plotters no
encouragement. Had he known of the letter and planned resignations from the
government, he would have said it was "completely ill-advised", he avers.
Unfortunately for the chancellor, few, especially those close to Mr Blair,
are inclined to believe his protestations of innocence.
The revelation that Tom Watson, the most notable of the signatories and an
acolyte of Mr Brown's, visited the chancellor at home in Fife the day before
the letter was faxed to Downing Street is deeply embarrassing for the
chancellor. Apparently, Mr Watson made the 1,000km (600-mile) round trip
just to drop in on the Browns and give them a present for their new-born
son, Fraser, and politics was the last thing on their minds. This is about
as convincing as Mr Brown's explanation for being photographed with a
vulpine grin on his face as he left Downing Street after one of two showdown
meetings with Mr Blair last week: he had just been talking about "nannies,
babies...nothing to do with politics", he said.
If Mr Brown was not as distant from the plot as he wants people to think,
then he is guilty of an appalling miscalculation. Two or three weeks ago,
with only a few exceptions, the cabinet and rising young Blairite ministers
were determined to make the best of Mr Brown's near-certain succession. The
prospect may not have filled every heart with gladness, but most were
hopeful that Mr Brown might become easier to work with—more relaxed, more
open, less inclined to listen to only a handful of chosen favourites—once he
had the top job. And given that their own prospects and those of the party
depended on his success, they would do whatever they could to help and
support him. All that has now been put in jeopardy.
A matter of temperament
As Mr Blair and Mr Brown stepped back from the brink at the end of last
week—the prime minister by unhappily committing himself publicly to stepping
down next year, the chancellor by disingenuously declaring that Mr Blair
must be allowed to decide the date of his departure—Charles Clarke dared to
say what many were whispering. In two newspaper interviews the former home
secretary, who was dumped by Mr Blair a few months ago for failing to get to
grips with the administrative chaos in his department, denounced Mr Brown's
behaviour. Describing that triumphalist smirk as "stupid, absolutely
stupid", he went on to cast further doubt on the chancellor's fitness for
the highest office.
According to Mr Clarke, Mr Brown had for years clung to the "delusion" that
he could have beaten Mr Blair for the leadership; he was "totally
uncollegiate", lacking in "courage" and had "psychological" issues. Mr
Clarke painted a picture of a brooding presence who, for all his talent and
ability, had frequently undermined the work of colleagues and the
effectiveness of the government. Mr Brown's riposte was that inevitably some
cabinet colleagues had become resentful as it had often been his job to deny
them money. This would have been more persuasive had the Treasury not
dispensed so much largesse so freely over the past six years.
Mr Clarke's attack was doubly devastating because nobody could accuse him of
acting on behalf of Mr Blair, since he was only saying in public what other
ministers had been muttering for years. Despite the eagerness in some
quarters to be shot of Mr Blair, plenty of people who have seen Mr Brown
close up agree with the verdict of one cabinet minister, that unless the
chancellor can change his modus operandi dramatically he will make a
terrible prime minister.
It is Mr Brown's character and temperament as much as his probable policies
that make some of his colleagues, not least Mr Blair, uncomfortable about
the prospect of his succession. As far as those policies are concerned, Mr
Brown has been remarkably opaque for years. Although he often talks about
further reform of the public services, the last time he presented a
comprehensive account of his ideas on the subject was more than four years
ago, when he appeared to question how far competition and choice could be
taken in health and education. Since then he has often seemed happy to allow
those opposed to Mr Blair's attempts to bring about change in the public
sector by introducing market disciplines to think he might agree with them.
That he almost certainly does not makes his past behaviour both stranger and
less admirable.
Indiscriminately unchummy
If anything, he has had even less to say about foreign affairs. He signals
that he would be no less robust than Mr Blair in fighting terrorism. And
though his natural caution would have made him less eager for military
adventures abroad, there is no reason to suppose that he would bring back
British troops from Iraq or Afghanistan any faster than Mr Blair.
Mr Brown might not be quite as chummy with Mr Bush as Mr Blair has been, but
then he is less chummy with almost everybody. He is instinctively
pro-America, however, admiring its economic dynamism and capacity for moral
uplift. His Europeanism, on the other hand, is tempered by his dislike of
the meetings he attends with his European Union counterparts (rarely
concealed) and frustration over the lack of zeal among some of them for
economic reform. But he has left it to commentators to connect the dots
rather than spell out himself what he believes.
At a time when ideological differences between the parties, or at least
between their leaders, are too subtle for most voters to discern and class
solidarity with specific parties has weakened, questions of character may
now become all important. The real significance of this month's events is
not that Mr Blair has lost the ability to control his political destiny but
that Mr Brown's complicated personality has become the central issue in
British politics.
Would Mr Bush ever have become president if voters in America had not found
the better-qualified Al Gore stiff and chilly? In Britain, a year ago, David
Davis appeared to have the Conservative leadership election sewn up. But the
moment, at the annual party conference, that a credible challenger emerged
in the shape of Mr Cameron, there were enough Conservatives who remembered
reasons to dislike Mr Davis—"disloyal" and "bully" were two words suddenly
applied to him—for the air to hiss quickly out of his campaign. Mr Cameron
conveyed freshness and charm; Mr Davis, staleness and menace. What then
guaranteed Mr Cameron's victory was the evidence of poll after poll that the
party would do better under his leadership than under Mr Davis's: the more
voters saw of the young Mr Cameron, the more they preferred him to a
grizzled machine politician.
Blairites who have long been infuriated by what they regard as Mr Brown's
destructive and graceless behaviour reckon that, faced with a plausible
rival, Mr Brown could perhaps suffer a similar fate. They were encouraged by
a poll by Populus published in the *Times *newspaper last week which
suggested that John Reid, the bullishly self-confident home secretary, would
do as well as Mr Brown against the Tories, despite being far less known. The
reason, according to someone close to Mr Blair, was that voters could see in
Mr Reid a natural leader.
Mr Blair himself is said to think that the young environment secretary,
David Miliband, might be Labour's best answer to the appealing Mr Cameron,
though Mr Miliband says he does not want to stand. Another much bruited name
is that of Alan Johnson, the education secretary
A former union leader, Mr Johnson does not suffer, as do Mr Brown and Mr
Reid, from the disadvantage of being a Scot in post-devolution England. Mr
Johnson is also immensely likeable. As one admirer puts it, "He's a fully
paid-up member of the human race, unlike Gordon."
The danger of being Browned off
Whether they, or anyone else, will actually challenge Mr Brown for the
leadership is still far from certain, for three reasons. First, a candidate
must have the support of 44 MPs in order to stand. Though Mr Brown is now
trying to persuade people that he positively welcomes an open contest, as
long as he remains the favourite to succeed Mr Blair only the reckless or
terminally unambitious are likely to come out in favour of an opponent.
Second, Mr Brown has been the heir-apparent for so long that it would be a
wrench for party activists and the members of affiliated trade unions to
back another. On September 12th, hours after Mr Blair had been heckled and
insulted at the Trades Union Congress, union leaders were cooing over Mr
Brown, even though he had made clear his support for the prime minister's
uncompromising reformist message. Third, as the financial steward of a
government that has spewed out cash for Labour's dearest causes, many feel
they owe him a debt of gratitude.
That could change if it becomes clear that Mr Brown's already questionable
rapport with the electorate has taken a further dive as a result of recent
events. It could also change if the sullen truce within the party that has
held since the weekend fails to last. In all probability, though, the crown
will still pass to Mr Brown. Whether the voters will forget before polling
day what they have learned this month about their next prime minister is
another matter. Many people will be eager to remind them, not least the
charming, lucky Mr Cameron. As Mr Brown knows better than most, politics is
a brutal business.
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