Britannia Radio

(Brogan here has today made his Telegraph debut having been political 
editor of the Mail.)

Brogan urges caution in showing too much of his economic hand and 
thus playing into Brown's hands.  In the light of today's YouGov poll 
and a major Tory lead, he might be right!

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TELEGRAPH 23.4.09
Labour is desperate, and fighting to the end
Benedict Brogan, our new chief political commentator, warns the 
Tories not to fall into the Prime Minister's elephant trap on taxation.

By Benedict Brogan

Gordon Brown likes dividing lines, and he has scrawled one, thick and 
red, across British politics. The Budget tells us that Labour will 
fight the next election on an old-fashioned platform of wealth-
destroying taxes and reckless spending. If any of this sounds 
familiar, voters need only note that we are days away from the 30th 
anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's 1979 victory, which was supposed 
to have ended all that.

On the other side of that line stands David Cameron, contemplating a 
moment of great danger for his leadership. Like the Iron Lady, he 
knows who the enemy is. And like her, he knows he must find ways of 
conveying a clear message: what the country was presented with 
yesterday may be the next Labour manifesto, but it should not be the 
first Tory budget.

Before a ballot has been cast, the Prime Minister has invited Mr 
Cameron to say, here and now, whether he will reverse these tax rises 
in office. In classic Brown style, the politics are refreshingly 
crude and designed to trap the Tories: principle or politics? Are you 
against tax increases or not?

So today, from the GMTV sofa to the Newsnight studio, and for the 
best part of the next 12 months, the Tory leader and those who speak 
for him must resist the temptation to answer a question to which any 
Conservative should have an instinctive, vehement answer. To do so 
would be to follow the script that the Prime Minister hopes will help 
him cling to power.

It is a crucial moment for the Tories. Mr Brown has announced what 
amounts to a generational shift in the balance between tax and 
spending. On every measure, the scale of the task facing an incoming 
Tory administration is as great as that faced by Mrs Thatcher 30 
years ago.
It is precisely for that reason that Mr Cameron will step around the 
elephant trap set by Mr Brown. As he pointed out in the Commons, 
Labour's claim to economic competence is "dead, over, finished". A 
party and a Prime Minister with no economic credibility are not 
entitled to ask "what would you do?"

That said, the initial signs are as they should be. A grudging 
willingness to accept a 45p rate is not going to extend to 50p, and 
where Labour - incredibly -proposes to let public spending continue 
rising in real terms, the Tories would not.

Study David Cameron's speeches, his interviews, his articles over the 
near four years he has been leader and there is plenty of evidence 
there that inside this husky-hugging metropolitan trendy beats the 
heart of a true Conservative. He has been clear again and again that 
if he has anything to do with it, taxes will go down under a Cameron-
led government.

The good news is that he has no intention of publishing his 
manifesto, let alone his first Budget, any time soon. And nor should 
he. Instead he must find ways of threading himself between Labour 
catcalls and legitimate questions from his own side.

There will be those on the Tory side - I can hear them already - who 
will try to present this Budget as some sort of Michael Foot suicide 
note, a political miscalculation that will seal Labour's fate. 
Surely, they will argue, this is the clincher? Surely now we shall be 
swept to victory on a tide of public revulsion at this grasping, 
venal, incompetent Government?

This would be to underestimate Mr Brown. In George Osborne's office 
he is sometimes portrayed as the Terminator, a relentless automaton 
of Teutonic mien who can only be counted as dead when the final 
glimmer of light has been crushed out of those red, malicious eyes.

The Shadow Chancellor, who is also his party's election co-ordinator, 
refuses to write off the Prime Minister, however much Labour MPs may 
be talking down their chances. He argues, rightly, that Mr Brown is 
not about to quit and has shown an annoying capacity for self-
preservation under pressure. Along with Mr Cameron, he is uneasy with 
glib talk of triple-digit majorities and an effortless march back to 
power.

His caution, frustrating to some, is borne of the harsh electoral 
realities the Tories face, even with polls pushing their lead back up 
towards 20 per cent. Labour losing power next year may now be a near 
certainty, but a Tory win remains sufficiently uncertain to make Team 
Cameron tread carefully in the face of an enemy who is cornered and 
dangerous. Even with the dead unburied and the country on its knees, 
Mrs Thatcher was returned with a majority of just 44. Sitting 
governments are hard to budge.

Mr Osborne also fears what those in the Brown bunker desperately 
hope: that, as the Chancellor predicted yesterday, the economy will 
start to improve at the end of this year, in time for Labour to 
claim, laughably as it may seem, that they got us through the 
recession and out the other side.
That Tory optimism that so worries the leadership is in part 
encouraged by the long faces of the MPs they see across the floor of 
the House. It is one of the oddities at Westminster that you get the 
longest odds on Labour's survival among Labour ministers and 
backbenchers who see nothing but rocks ahead.

Their depression is understandable. Whatever fleeting bounce Mr Brown 
enjoyed in the aftermath of a successful G20 has been wiped out by 
the disasters of the past fortnight. At the end of Easter week he was 
banking on a few days' rest and then the Budget to set him up for the 
June elections campaign that opens next week.

Instead the exposure of Damian McBride's smear emails has had a 
devastating effect inside Downing Street and across the Labour party. 
Ministers speak of their shame at being members of a party that 
stoops so low, on top of managing things so badly.

Mr Brown has also been told by his Chief Whip Nick Brown to expect 
resignations when four years' worth of expenses are published in 
July. By-elections are likely. Part of what motivated the Prime 
Minister to rush out his half-baked plan for reform on Tuesday night 
was the belief that another political crisis is imminent when the 
public discovers the scale of the frauds perpetrated by some MPs.

This, in part, explains why yesterday's Budget was such a partisan 
exercise. Mr Brown's strategy must be to shore up his Labour base 
after being told by pollsters in recent weeks that turnout will play 
a crucial role in deciding his fate. The party's grassroots shows 
every sign of staying home rather than voting, forcing the Prime 
Minister to cast about for ways of galvanising his core supporters.

Alistair Darling's talk of "fairness and opportunity" was just a 
modern way of camouflaging simple pandering to sectional interests. 
Whether on raising higher-rate income tax or scrapping pension 
reliefs, Mr Brown will ignore the totemic shift of a move back to the 
days when the Labour taxman took half or more of what you earned and 
hammer home his message that only one or two per cent of earners are 
concerned.

It is not a strategy that is finding universal approval among Labour 
MPs. There are already rumblings from the Cabinet and elsewhere who 
argue Labour will destroy itself if it insists on pandering to 
minorities while ignoring the interests of the English middle 
classes. "Gordon is not interested in middle England and that's 
what's killing us," one Cabinet minister told me.

Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne point out that they called it right back in 
the autumn. When Mr Brown was telling us Britain was best placed to 
weather the downturn, they were pointing to the mountain of debt 
stifling the economy; when Mr Brown gloated that the 1990 recession 
was worse, it was Mr Osborne who told the Tory conference: "The 
cupboard is bare, there is no more money."

No wonder Mr Cameron concluded yesterday, in a Budget response that 
was striking in its authority and coldly controlled anger, that "the 
fundamental truth is that all Labour governments run out of money".

In Armando Iannucci's searing satire about Labour spin doctors, In 
The Loop, the foul-mouthed Alastair Campbell figure muses: "What's 
brave about doing the right thing? Doing the wrong thing is sometimes 
braver." To all those who say the right thing now is for Mr Cameron 
to show his hand, he should consider that doing what to a Tory must 
seem instinctively wrong is - for the moment - the braver course.