Britannia Radio

It's hardly surprising that the civil service has lost interest in 
helping what they see as a decaying administration.  Anyone less pig-
headed than Brown would 'read the runes' and realise that it's no use 
going through the motions any more.  He should put his record before 
the voters and let them judge.  After all unless you live in 
Kirkcaldy you've never had a chance to vote for him yet!

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TELEGRAPH 27.2.08
Indiscipline, chaos and decay: this is how governments die
He is preparing to address Congress in Washington next week, but at 
home, Gordon Brown's government is disintegrating, says Iain Martin.

By Iain Martin

Pity Gordon Brown's speechwriters and closest colleagues this 
weekend. A select band have been drawn together to work on the PM's 
address to Congress in Washington on Tuesday, and they will be having 
a miserable time.

Brown will first have held court, spewing out ideas for the advisers 
to jot down. It will by now have fallen to some poor sap to turn the 
potage of historical allusions and rhetoric about global solutions 
into a first draft. Next, the team will plough through numerous 
redrafts. But Brown will only be warming up. There are still four and 
a half days left until he speaks.

By Sunday, Team Brown will be suffering from severe sleep 
deprivation, taking phone calls and emails from the PM around the 
clock. Most likely, the advisers will have an agreed text signed off 
only as they board the plane for Washington. And only then will Brown 
decide that he does not like the prepared speech. At that point, he 
will, I confidently predict, start bashing out a new one on a laptop. 
Head down, his hands a blur, as they have been thousands of times 
down the years, this is how Brown always works.

But this Washington event is different. Usually, when it is said that 
leaders must deliver the "speech of a lifetime" it is a cliché. On 
this occasion, there is something in the phrase: it is the speech of 
Brown's lifetime.

For an American history obsessive who thrills to the mention of 
Robert Kennedy or FDR, and has countless Democrat friends, addressing 
Congress is about as good as a life lived in politics gets.

He will agonise over his words even more obsessively than usual 
because he imagines, wrongly, that the occasion offers the 
possibility of vindication and a fresh start for his premiership. It 
matters, certainly, but not for those reasons. Instead, Tuesday's 
address is the valedictory pinnacle of his public career: a 
figurative full-stop rather than any kind of new chapter.

For Brown's government is disintegrating. Yesterday's pass-the-parcel 
of blame over who agreed the extraordinary £693,000 pension to Sir 
Fred Goodwin - payable the moment he left the bank last year - shows 
it is so.
In securing a deal in October to get Goodwin out the door, Treasury 
minister Lord Myners appears not to have worried too much about the 
terms of the settlement. Myners is one of the PM's favourite bankers 
(it's a long list) and I am sure that £693,000 does not seem like 
that large a sum of money to him. He had been told to get Goodwin 
gone, and did so. But why did no one else have the sense to overrule 
the deal?

For the answer, remember that in October Brown and Darling had 
bankers to the left of them, bankers to the right. There was key 
adviser Baroness Vadera, the recently ennobled Myners, "Fred the 
Shred", Sir James Crosby and more. With so many "masters of the 
universe" on hand it is perhaps unsurprising that no mortal was 
allowed the space to say: "Hold on, Goodwin's activities broke the 
bank and have crippled the taxpayer. Fire him and say, 'see you in 
court'."

If there was such chaos only on the banking front, it would be bad 
enough. But in every respect, it gets worse for Brown. Wracked by 
indiscipline, the Government is increasingly incapable of holding the 
line against internal and external critics.

Over Lord Mandelson's attempt to part-privatise the Royal Mail there 
is open Labour rebellion. Harriet Harman has led the charge in 
Cabinet, having to be blocked by Brown when she suggested delaying 
the Bill. Harman might be a politically correct joke, but Labour's 
deputy leader has courted discontented MPs and thinks that the 
Government has positioned itself in the wrong place on bankers' 
bonuses, and now the Royal Mail. In the absence of an obvious 
alternative, Harman is preparing to fight for the leadership, post-
defeat. Each week, she becomes more audacious in her opposition to 
Brown.

The best indication of how advanced the corrosion is lies further 
down the food chain. In normal circumstances, a PPS (Parliamentary 
Private Secretary) would resign or be fired for opposing government 
policy in public. These MPs are not paid a ministerial salary and 
while not members of the government, are expected to act as such. 
They provide a link between a minister and parliament, offering an 
official channel for backbenchers keen to raise concerns. They are an 
early warning system against insurrection and are not supposed to 
engage in rebellions.
Yet, as many as 10 of these types have signed the EDM (a type of 
parliamentary motion) opposing Lord Mandelson's part-privatisation 
plans.

This is the behaviour of a government at war with itself. Among the 
many Labour MPs who have signed up are the individual PPSs to Justice 
Secretary Jack Straw, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband, Defence 
Secretary John Hutton, Environment Secretary Hilary Benn and Olympics 
minister Tessa Jowell.

Astonishingly, the Government's chief whip, Nick Brown, has had to 
rule that no action will be taken. Thus, MPs who are supposed to be 
helping the Brown administration conduct its work are allowed to 
campaign openly against a central plank of policy. That this 
indicates extreme weakness is obvious: the PPS rebellion is too large 
for Number 10 to countenance any sanctions against its internal 
opponents.

Civil servants, knowing that an election is 15 months away, observe 
all these developments and draw perfectly understandable conclusions. 
Is it a surprise that the usual ministerial levers are said to be 
seizing up and frustration abounds? The mandarins are waiting for a 
changing of the guard.

Outside the gates of Downing Street, others who have either waited a 
long time for their revenge or calculate there is no mileage left in 
being closely associated with Brown are speaking up. Yesterday, 
Mervyn King, the much put-upon governor of the Bank of England, said 
that politicians had been in thrall to bankers for too long and that 
the Government had let institutions take too many risks during the 
boom years.

He echoed robust remarks made earlier this week by Lord Turner, the 
chairman of the Financial Services Authority, that regulators had 
been under heavy pressure from Brown not to be "too heavy and 
intrusive" with wayward institutions such as Northern Rock. Turner no 
longer fears the wrath of Gord.

The PM is not entirely alone in his bunker. Impressed by his 
fortitude, there are still loyal friends and advisers hoping that 
something, anything, will turn up. Said one earlier this week, before 
the death of Ivan Cameron stilled life at Westminster: "We're still 
at 30 points in the polls. Thirty points! After everything that's 
happened."

But such support has a desperate feel to it and does not disguise the 
decay and a very simple truth: this is how governments which have 
been in power for too long die.