The horrible truth is that cowards prosper in Britain
From the City to Westminster, it's clear that doing nothing is still the profitable and prudent option
In normal times, he who plays safe plays best. The assumption that an apparently doomed leader will survive or apparently calamitous policy come good in the end is true more frequently than radicals like to admit. Going along with the conventional wisdom not only ensures your career will prosper, but also, and perhaps to your surprise, puts you on the right side of the argument. The environmental catastrophe never happens. The system does not fall apart. The advocates of urgent change turn out to be hysterics and wisdom turns out to lie with those who insisted there was never a need to panic.
I am sorry to dwell on the obvious, but we are not living through normal times but a rolling crisis. The banking crash led to recession, which led to a popular fury at the often minor, but still telling, corruptions of MPs who were fiddling expenses while the financial system boomed and bust. That anger has now concentrated on the shattered Brown administration, whose manifest failings could destroy Labour's chances of winning another election - maybe forever, if the Liberal Democratsand Greens take over what remains of the centre-left.
In every phase of the crisis, intelligent people who could have spoken out when it may have made a difference chose to stay silent. At a time when the cowardice of the respectable has led to ruin, we do not need to concern ourselves with the pathologies of alarmists but should worry instead about the delusions of safe, sensible men and women who boast of their pragmatism.
James Purnell must be thinking of little else this weekend. On Thursday night, he fixed his bayonet and went over the top. All it needed to get rid of Brown was for his comrades to follow him. When he told the prime minister: "Your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more, not less likely", Alistair Darling, Alan Johnson, David Miliband, John Denham and MPs from all wings of the party agreed. If they retain a shred of leftish conviction, they must also have shared Purnell's belief that a Conservative government would squash their hopes for an "active state, better public services and open democracy".
They had everything to lose by sticking with Brown. Yet instead of fighting, they stayed in office and mouthed oaths of loyalty to a leader they despise, which did not even rise to the level of plausible lies.
They may not suffer for it. Cowardice is a court-martial offence in the military, but those who shirk necessary confrontations in civilian life rarely face the firing squad.
Of course, everyone understands that fear of the sack keeps good people in line and few blame them for it. If I had to pick one story that encapsulates the folly of the British elite in the first decade of the 21st century, it would be the cautionary tale of Paul Moore, which does not come from politics but banking. He was HBOS's risk manager, who merely did what his bank had hired him to do and warned that it was engaged in wildly risky lending. James Crosby, the chief executive, duly fired him. Brown duly knighted Crosby and put him in charge of financial regulation. HBOS duly went down, in part because its staff had learnt that the price of bearing unwelcome news was dismissal.
A prudent desire to hang on to their jobs once motivated ministers, but it is not the sole reason for cowardice in public life or even the main one. Bank staff may have been intimidated, but no regulators would have been punished if they had condemned the deranged policies of the banks before the crash. Similarly, Miliband and his colleagues would not suffer now if they spoke up for the best interests of Labour. Quite the reverse, as Brown's power to hurt them has gone.
Keynes explained cowardice in politics and business best when he said of the financiers of the Great Depression: "A 'sound' banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him."
If you can pretend that a disaster was an act of God or natural catastrophe that no one could have stopped, then everyone is in clear. What was true of Keynes's 1930s is true today. The City economists who failed to recognise that their firms were pumping a bubble have not become outcasts. Financial journalists still treat analysts from RBS, HBOS and NatWest with respect, even though the bill for bailing out their banks will take taxpayers who have never earned a six-figure bonus a generation to repay.
I suspect that those ministers who sat on their hands this weekend will not be blamed for the demise of leftish Britain either. Certainly, if Brown goes quickly, and he still may, all of them will keep their jobs and be praised by one and all for their "safe pair of hands".
At the time of writing, it is the politicians who spoke out who are being snubbed. As Keynes might have predicted, Westminster journalists and even the BBC have long treated Charles Clarke, who was right about Brown from the start, as an obsessive and a bore with only one thing to say, even though that one thing happens to be true. Meanwhile, many Labour MPs are already casting Purnell as an awkward and unclubbable man, who should have bitten his tongue.
As the bodies pile up and the stench from the rotten state rises, writers are reaching for Shakespearean metaphors. I understand the temptation, but they are being too kind.
Today's respectable cowards do not have the tragic indecision of Hamlet, but the banal timorousness of Prufrock and maybe not even that. Prufrock at least had a self-knowledge his successors in the cabinet do not possess and could see that ...
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -
Almost, at times, the Fool.
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