Britannia Radio

TELEGRAPH   15.9.08
Gordon Brown's woes are not a Labour problem - we are all in trouble
    By Janet Daley

Well, one thing's for sure now - it isn't going to be dignified. The 
time for graceful exits has come and gone. Watching that procession 
of female Labour MPs nobody's ever heard of flinging themselves over 
the cliff at the weekend, I was reminded of Margaret Thatcher's 
remark: "In politics, when you want something said, ask a man. When 
you want something done, ask a woman."

This characteristically perceptive insight may help to explain why it 
has been a procession of little girls who have been prepared to 
sacrifice themselves for the greater good and dared to demand a 
leadership election, while the big, brave men in Cabinet have cowered 
in the shadows. But the terms in which those gutsy women, and the few 
robust male backbenchers who stand beside (or immediately behind) 
them, are putting their case is revealing. As, indeed, are the 
responses of the Brown loyalists, who reply to their charges in the 
very same terms.

They are all talking about the future of their party. It is Labour 
that must be saved, in whatever way might now be possible.

The people who are leading the challenge and calling for nomination 
papers talk about the party being adrift, lacking "direction and 
leadership", needing a "deep and far-reaching debate" about its 
objectives. Gordon Brown's supporters then counter that he is the 
only plausible leader to restore the party's standing, that they are 
confident he can rebuild Labour's reputation before the next 
election, that what is needed is a "stronger vision of what we want 
to do", blah-blah. Hello? Where do the rest of us come into this 
picture?

Would anyone care to address the point that the country is now 
sliding into recession, facing its worst property slump in more than 
a decade and its most serious foreign threat since the end of the 
Cold War - and all this under a government that is so dysfunctional 
as to be effectively paralysed? This internecine scrap is not just 
about the future of Labour - or even of New Labour, whatever that 
means now.

The fact that all the participants in this scrum seem to think it is, 
is a sure sign of their decline: when a governing party becomes so 
introverted and self-obsessed as to fail to understand its most basic 
duty to the electorate, it is well and truly finished.

Scarcely any - in fact none that I have read - of the statements 
emanating from either side of this little civil war have contained a 
word about the responsibility of a party in power at such a perilous 
time to remain effective, competent and focused on the issues that 
may determine our economic survival and national security. Indeed, Mr 
Brown seems to have been so preoccupied over the summer with his 
plans for relaunching his leadership that he barely noticed the 
dramatic events in Georgia. And his Foreign Secretary, David 
Miliband, was so compromised by his own quixotic bid for the 
leadership that he was struck dumb for days on end while the Russians 
marched into two provinces of a country we now regard as an ally.

But the most directly culpable folly must surely have been that of 
the Chancellor, who, in what would seem to have been a desperate fit 
of party political positioning, actually talked down the economy. 
When Alistair Darling declared that we were now in the most serious 
economic crisis the country had faced in 60 years, he precipitated a 
stock-market plunge and a dramatic fall in the value of the pound. I 
cannot recall any sitting Chancellor of the Exchequer doing such a 
thing, let alone surviving in office to tell the tale.

Mr Darling was, to all intents and purposes, responsible for the 
actual financial loss suffered by thousands of individuals, and a 
reduction in the value of the capital held by the country. His later 
mumbled retraction of his comment was, as they say, too little too 
late. The damage had been done, and while the Government is in such 
disarray it is unlikely to be undone.

Indeed, another Cabinet minister has now reiterated the original 
Darling thesis. John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business and 
Enterprise no less, was thrown into what looked like wild panic in a 
television interview yesterday by a series of deeply discomfiting 
questions about the future of the Government.

In the course of this rabbit-in-the-headlights performance, he 
actually chose to reaffirm the Chancellor's original judgment that 
our economic circumstances were "the worst for 60 years". Behind the 
eye-rolling, you could almost see Mr Hutton's brain setting itself to 
autopilot: must be loyal to Cabinet colleague; must agree with 
everything previously stated by fellow Brownite. So out it came. 
Asked by Andrew Marr whether he too believed that the economy was in 
its worst fix for 60 years, he said yes. The shriek of pain from the 
fund managers and the City brokers was just about audible where I 
live in north London.

My brother commentators are all searching for historical parallels 
for this débâcle in the hopes of predicting the outcome: is it like 
Thatcher's fall, or John Major's recovery? Is this James Callaghan 
all over again (a leader who failed to understand the depths of the 
trouble he was in), or is it more like the political assassination of 
Iain Duncan Smith (a leader who never got to fight a general election)?

Answer: not really any of the above.

Every tumultuous political event is unique. It is always a 
concatenation of individual personalities and unprecedented 
circumstances, and nobody - however much he has seen and experienced 
- can be much good at foretelling the outcome. In this case, 
personality seems to be playing a peculiarly prominent role - because 
the personality in question is so very idiosyncratic.

So how should David Cameron, whose behaviour is still governed by 
reason rather than hysteria, react? There must be an almost 
irresistible temptation to withdraw from the arena, to sit back 
smugly and watch Labour implode. It is generally assumed that when 
the party in power is so deeply embedded in the muck, there is little 
that an opposition leader needs to do. But under the present 
conditions, I am not sure.

Shouldn't he personally be saying that this is shamefully self-
indulgent behaviour from a governing party at a time that its own 
spokesmen describe as being one of crisis? Shouldn't the voters be 
made to feel that there is a prospective prime minister who is not 
playing this game purely for party advantage and is actually prepared 
to speak up on their behalf?