After an extraordinary week in politics every paper says much the
same - Brown should GO - NOW!
Even Polly Toynbee's conclusion - and she's my 'totem' political hate
figure amomgst journalists - says - - -
==="Gordon Brown: no ideas and no regrets
----------Under his leadership Labour has become a rotten, defeatist
rabble"
================================
DAILY MAIL 2.5.09
So, who will hand Brown the loaded revolver and bottle of whisky?
By PETER OBORNE
Since 1945, three Prime Ministers have self-destructed while in
office, leading to a paralysis in the running of the country. Sadly,
Britain has just embarked on yet another of these rudderless periods.
Nothing can save Gordon Brown.
The first Prime Minister to implode was the poor Anthony Eden, who
was in charge in 1956 during the failure of the Suez campaign.
The Tory premier lost his mental grip, took an enforced holiday in
the West Indies and then resigned on his return to Britain.
Next, Jim Callaghan was destroyed early in 1979 when the trades
unions refused to accept his policy of voluntary pay restraint.
As a result, 'Sunny Jim' knew he was finished, though he maintained
his dignity right up to the end.
John Major was the third Prime Minister simply to collapse in office.
He realised his tenure at No 10 was up the moment that sterling was
humiliatingly ejected from the Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black
Wednesday in 1992.
His Government's economic policy was destroyed in a flash, although
Major hung on with increasing desperation for five more years.
It is still possible that Labour's 60-strong parliamentary majority
will allow Gordon Brown to hang on to power until the General
Election, which must be held in June next year at the latest.
But the events of the past two weeks have been so dramatic that he
has now lost his political and moral authority.
It would be better for his own sake, for the sake of the country, and
certainly for the sake of the Labour Party if he quit office as soon
as possible.
Consider first, the case of Gordon Brown's own state of mind. I am
informed that his personal behaviour has become erratic. He is
increasingly prone to fits of rage.
'I've a year to go. I've got a majority of 60. Do they realise that
they will let the Tories in?' he shouted as he confronted defeat in
the Commons this week over the issue of MPs' expenses and the
settlement rights of the Gurkhas.
He regularly screams at officials, throws things and crumples up
pieces of paper in fits of anger. According to one Downing Street
aide, it is no longer possible to predict Brown's moods - whether
he's going to be nice (indeed, the PM is still capable of being
charming on occasions) or violently hostile.
The Prime Minister is sleeping less and less, refusing to take time
off at weekends, and is becoming ever more isolated.
Indeed, his relationship with Alistair Darling has broken down to
such an extent that - remarkably - Brown is behaving as if he had
nothing to do with his Chancellor's Budget delivered last month.
When asked about the financial measures, he perversely refers
questions to Darling - despite the fact that he was intimately
involved, dispatching a blizzard of memos to the Treasury ahead of
the Budget.
In the meantime, the government machine has broken down and civil
servants are in despair. Ministers complain that it is impossible to
get a decision out of Downing Street, while others say that any
decisions that are made are done so for irrational, purely political
reasons.
One permanent secretary complained about the Budget, saying the
Chancellor's financial figures do not add up. He said: 'We either
need spending cuts, or a larger departmental budget. We are in a
situation where the official figures are just not deliverable.'
Another civil servant is even gloomier. 'We are moving towards a
crisis which can only be resolved by an emergency statement to the
House of Commons in the autumn,' he warned. Other Treasury officials
are pressing for the setting up of an emergency committee to
investigate the need for drastic cuts in public spending.
But No 10 will not permit such a move. This, in turn, has led to a
growing dread inside the Treasury that the Debt Management Office
(which sells gilts for the Treasury) will be unable to fund the
budget deficit on international markets. In all this, there is one
crucial contrast between what is happening now and the final months
of Callaghan and Major's administrations.
Whereas both these men recognised the severity of the financial
crisis that was facing the nation and took radical steps to cut
public spending (and therefore reassure the City markets), Brown has
ignored the problems and left any economies until after the next
election.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party as a whole is in crisis. Many
backbenchers are terrified that 12 more months of Gordon Brown will
cause the party to be out of power for a generation, just as the
Tories were after 1997 and Labour after 1979.
Six months ago, at the Labour Party conference in Manchester, the
Brownite and Blairite factions came together to agree a truce. This
settlement worked well for a while and helped lead to the recovery of
the Prime Minister's fortunes last winter.
Now, however, the peace deal has broken down, with allies of Blair
once again openly critical of Brown. Blair himself has taken the
hostile step of allowing it to be known that he thought little of the
Darling Budget - just as Margaret Thatcher used to brief behind the
scenes against her successor, John Major, over Europe and other issues.
This new mood of internecine rancour explains, in part at least, last
week's embarrassing Commons mutiny over the treatment of the Gurkhas.
In private, and increasingly in public, Labour MPs admit that the
next election is lost and that the only question is the size of the
Tory majority.
Many are painfully aware that another year of Gordon Brown could make
matters worse and lead to a truly epic defeat.
Typical is former Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, who said yesterday
he felt 'ashamed' to be a Labour MP and called for Brown to 'improve
his performance'.
He said watching the party's recent woes develop had been 'absolutely
terrible'. Next month's local and European elections will drive home
the sheer horror of Labour's predicament.
In the meantime, Brown lingers on. Unlike Major and Callaghan, who
managed to keep their feet on the ground until the end, Brown
resembles Eden.
Like the patrician Tory, he is a very proud man. And like Eden, who
was Churchill's deputy for a decade, Brown was forced to wait an
unendurable length of time before achieving his ambition of becoming
Prime Minister. And like Eden, Brown is also losing sight of everyday
reality.
Perhaps he will be able to cling on until election day. But that can
no longer be assumed. Gordon Brown does not want to quit, but he may
have no choice. He talks to fewer and fewer people these days, but
one of them is the Business Secretary Peter Mandelson.
The two men go back a very long way - more than 25 years. During that
time they have been close friends and bitter enemies, warm allies and
ugly rivals.
If anyone is to hand Gordon Brown the revolver and the bottle of
whisky, it will be Peter Mandelson.
===========================
TELEGRAPH 2.5.09
There's one more thing Gordon Brown can do
Britain is in a terrible state. Our people are losing their jobs,
their homes, their businesses, their livelihoods. The Prime Minister
should call an election, says Simon Heffer.
Well might David Blunkett have lamented Labour's "self-inflicted
wounds" yesterday (and he knows a thing or two about those). What
with the idiotically callous treatment of the Gurkhas, and the
debacle over MPs' expenses, we have had exposed a party of which, by
any objective standards, the credibility of the leadership is now in
ruins. I noted a Labour MP quoted as saying it was his party's "worst
week". He failed only to add the word "yet".
As I watched the absurdities (and any party that casually makes an
enemy of the great Joanna Lumley has shown that it is truly absurd),
I was reminded of Sir Denis Thatcher's apt simile about someone being
as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest. On one
level, Mr Brown's travails are comical. It is almost bracing to see a
man who has inflicted as much damage on this country as he has
receiving one humiliation after another; for each makes it less
likely that he will be preserved in office to do more harm.
But in many other respects, this is deadly serious. Britain is in a
terrible state. Our people are losing their jobs, their homes, their
businesses, their livelihoods. We are drowning in debt. We have
decided to pursue a taxation policy that will drive successful people
abroad and stifle talent and enterprise. And now we have a Government
of paralysis, staffed by incompetents and sleazeballs, that should
make way for something better, but won't.
Labour's next "worst week" could come at any time. If it hasn't
happened before then, put the first week of June in your diaries. The
likelihood is that on the morning of Friday 5 we shall learn that
Labour has been thrashed in the English county council elections,
held the previous day: there could even be evidence that the
Conservatives have started to advance in areas closed to them since
the mid-1990s, such as in the north. Then, scarcely having recovered
from that blast, Labour will get the second barrel on Sunday 7, when
the results of the European elections (held the previous Thursday)
are released as polls close in the rest of Europe.
It is not impossible that some truly horrible things could happen to
Labour in these elections. They could well come third in both of
them. And they could see voters in some of their heartlands, such as
east London, north Lancashire and the West Riding, returning BNP
candidates either to councils or as MEPs. What a triumph that would
be for the party of the people.
At the root of all this is Mr Brown's pathological inability to admit
error. Given the Prime Minister's record, it would be a bit like Fred
the Shred claiming he did a great job at RBS. Mr Brown not only
cannot make a sensible decision: he becomes trapped in his bad ones.
He could not see the lunacy of his expenses proposals, or of
persisting with them long after even most of his own party had
rejected them. He could not see how iniquitous the public found his
refusal to admit heroic Gurkhas to this country, when he is quite
happy to preside over an immigration policy that welcomes scroungers
and fanatics almost without restraint. And, of course, in a week when
it has been satisfactorily proved that the proposed 50p tax rate will
cost more to collect than it will raise, he won't dream of backing
down on that iniquity, either.
As is frequently said, we have seen all this before, in the deathbed
days of the Major government. Actually, this is worse: thanks to our
expulsion from the ERM in 1992, the economy was, by 1996-97, doing
rather well. The Tories lost because of their dishonesty and
incompetence in other areas.
I suppose Mr Brown wants a legacy of something other than failure and
ruin. He will struggle. All I can suggest is that, even at this late
stage, he strives to show himself equal to the heavy responsibilities
of his high office.
He could best do that by deciding not to impose further suffering on
us, asking for a dissolution, and so giving the country the general
election it so needs and deserves. [The petition for this at 1130 am
stands at: 43,806 -cs]
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