So now Blair accuses Brown of hubris and vacuity. What a truly

The circus goes on and it’s almost impossible not to join in. The
state of our politics is so low that people seriously consider that
the young inexperienced Miliband has the qualities to be a prime
minister!

He portrayed his ignorance the other day on his very own subjects on
“Question Time” .

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DAILY MAIL 4.8.08
So now Blair accuses Brown of hubris and vacuity. What a truly
glorious case of pots and kettles!

Did Tony Blair ever really go away? When David Miliband launched his
not-so-coded attempt to unseat Gordon Brown with his explosive
article in the Guardian last week, people wondered whether the
Foreign Secretary was acting alone or was backed by other revolting
Blairites.

We now have the answer to that question. Yesterday, a memo written by
Tony Blair piling ordure on Brown's premiership surfaced in the Mail
on Sunday. Reportedly written just after last year's party
conferences, it has been leaked now for one reason alone: to aid
David Miliband's lunge for power.

Miliband was always the former Prime Minister's favourite political
son - the anointed heir to the Blairite dynasty.

Now, amid reports that Blair has been holding regular talks with
Miliband, another of his leading acolytes, Stephen Byers, has also
popped up to denounce Brown's policies as inadequate for the
challenges facing Labour.
While we don't know who made the Blair missive available, its
publication sensationally ups the stakes. This is a Blairite plot.

Revenge, it might be said, is a dish best served in a cold
memorandum. It was Brown who orchestrated the destabilisation
campaign against Blair which forced him out of Number Ten.

Now it's payback time for the beleaguered Prime Minister with a dose
of his own brutal medicine from the Blairites - and with the
opinion polls suggesting that the Government would leap ten points if
Blair were still in charge. Ouch.

But as I wrote here last week, anyone who thinks that Miliband - or
any other leader, for that matter - will solve Labour's problems
must be living in la-la-land.

It's not just that the current shenanigans bring the words 'ferrets'
and 'sack' strongly to mind. It's that not only Gordon Brown but the
Labour Government itself is in freefall. Voters want to be shot of
the whole damn lot of them.

They also won't forgive a party that inflicts upon them not one but
two replacement Prime Ministers. But if the new leader were to call a
quick election, the party would be slaughtered.

What's more, the polls also suggest that under David Miliband, Labour
would do even worse than under Gordon Brown. For what Miliband lacks
is the single most important thing that won Blair three elections in
a row - charisma.

The point of similarity between them, however, is that both have the
disconcerting capacity to believe absolutely in their own spin,
however absurd it may be. Thus Miliband could write with a straight
face that there was no social breakdown in Britain, that education
standards were rising and that the NHS had been brought back from the
brink.

The leaked memo, meanwhile, has graphically revealed Blair's own
monumental self-delusion. In his eagerness to blame Brown, he refuses
to acknowledge his own role in the Government's current difficulties.
He accuses Brown of junking the Blairite policy agenda. But it's that
agenda which has given us filthy hospital wards, mass illiteracy
among schoolchildren and an epidemic of violent crime.

True, domestic policy was tightly controlled from the Treasury by
Gordon Brown. But who allowed the Chancellor free rein to muck up the
public services in this way?

One T. Blair. True, Brown undermined Blairite initiatives such as
welfare reform. But Blair let him get away with it.

Throughout all the years in which the Chancellor was reportedly
undermining the Prime Minister, Blair refused to sack him. Instead he
was happy to share the credit for the good times, basking in the
general adulation for the 'most brilliant Chancellor in Labour's
history'. Blair rounded on Brown in public only when the New Labour
project they ran together went belly-up.

Chancellor Brown was Blair's creation. Now the former Prime Minister
is compounding his own lack of courage by turning on the man who has
been able to plunge the Labour Government into today's crisis only
because Blair allowed him to reach that position.

The memo says Brown's mistake was to 'diss' Blair's record, to blame
the culture of spin and proclaim a new honesty in politics. On the
contrary - Brown's terrible error was to continue Blair's record of
spin and dishonesty.
If anything did for Brown, it was this crumbling of his reputation as
a rock of Caledonian moral integrity - such as breaking his
manifesto promise of a referendum on the EU constitution, and then
denying that it was a constitution at all.

Yes, Brown has signalled that he wants to bring home British troops
from Iraq sooner than his predecessor planned. Personally, I share
Blair's concern about this. But it is absurd to believe that the
electorate disapproves - or even factors it into the charge sheet
against the Prime Minister.

The fact is that Iraq contributed hugely to Blair's own political
demise. The memo says 'DC (David Cameron) was in trouble long before
TB left'. Very true. But TB was also in trouble long before TB left.

Blair claims he had kept Cameron 'confused' by sticking to New Labour
policies, whereas the Tory leader had been 'empowered' by Brown's
short-term tactics - such as mimicking the Tory proposal to raise
the inheritance tax threshold.

But the Tory inheritance tax plan had nothing to do with Brown's
tactics. It came out of the blue at last year's Tory conference.

It was that proposal which single-handedly transformed Tory fortunes.
At that point, it dawned on the Cameroons that there were more votes
in reaching out to the hard-pressed silent majority than in mimicking
Blairite gesture politics.

Yet despite all this, Blair has the gall to accuse Brown of 'hubris
and vacuity'! Pots and kettles, anyone?

If, however, one stands back from this hand-to-hand fighting to take
a longer view, the real problem becomes clear - - that the illusion
on which the Government rested has fallen apart.

New Labour was based on a sleight of hand designed to paper over the
intellectual crisis of the Left. With the fall of socialism, Left-
wing ideology went out of the window. State control of the economic
levers of power belonged with the dinosaurs.

The only thing that mattered - in Blair's famous phrase - was
'what works'. So with no one believing in anything any more, the
ethic of public service was swept aside by the tricks of the trade of
management consultancy.

Thus was born the target culture. Professionalism - based on
independence, trust and responsibility - was superseded by armies
of regulators. The red flag was replaced by red tape.

The paradox was that this explosion of bureaucracy meant even more
control from the centre - imposed and policed by Chancellor Brown,
who used it to further his own agenda of social engineering.

Unsurprisingly, such incoherence caused the public sector
progressively to seize up altogether. It also meant that Labour had
no unity of purpose. The only thing keeping it together was Blair's
genius at winning elections.

Effectively, Blair propped up Labour's corpse and passed it off as a
living entity. If the party now turns inwards upon itself - and the
revolt appears to be gathering pace - those mouldy bones may
finally disintegrate altogether.

It may well be that Labour cannot win the next election with Gordon
Brown as leader. But if it commits regicide then, just like the
Tories after they deposed Mrs Thatcher, Labour will unleash an
internal war which may keep it out of power for a generation - or
longer.

New Labour has turned into a bed of nails. But along with Tony Blair
and Gordon Brown, the Labour Party made it - and now it must lie on
it.