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I send this out merely because I can’t resist commenting on it!  It is so absurd that parody is impossible!  Mary Riddell has long been scorned by me as a NewLabour luvvie, unable to spot any flaw ever in thir virtue.  [BTW does anyone know if she is related to The Timesresident NewLabour groupie, Peter Riddell ?]  

Christina

TELEGRAPH  8.9.09

Gordon Brown, the Nowhere Man, can still hit back – but he can't just let it be

With the whiff of panic in the air, Labour seems incapable of broadening its horizons, saysMary Riddell.

 

By Mary Riddell

Beatlemania may be one of the few forms of madness not to assail the Government. Nonetheless the re-release of the Fab Four's greatest hits holds messages for Number 10. After the worst autumn start imaginable, Gordon Brown's critics could just as well be describing Nowhere Man.

"Doesn't have a point of view, Knows not where he's going to." The first point is unfair and the second inaccurate, not least since most Labour MPs have little doubt as to their destination. [She WAS talking about Brown, not Labour MPs! -cs]  On current form, they are heading for what the influential backbencher Jon Cruddas, terms "catastrophic defeat".

His speech tonight to the Compass think tank is, inevitably, being trailed by the media as a come-on to anyone hoping to unseat Mr Brown. But Mr Cruddas, who said a few weeks ago that he couldn't see "how it's any remedy to our problems to throw one bloke under a train and put another bloke in through a coronation", has not changed his mind.

"My point is not to criticise Gordon Brown at all," he told me yesterday. "It is to ask why we have lost our voice and story." The hostile and the disappointed can suggest many reasons. The Government is in turmoil, Cabinet ministers are revolting, rebels regroup, foreign policy unravels and, as Mr Cruddas says, no one is laying a glove on the Tories. [AND the rest!  Like policies failing; causing the crash, lying over Libya, sending ill-equipped troops in insufficient numbers to die in Afghan wars; killing thousands of patients in NHS  hospitals like Stafford; letting education standards fall - - and the rest! -cs] 

Take rebellion first. There may be another attempted putsch, but it is hard to see how it might succeed. Although some Cabinet members do not rule out Mr Brown stepping down of his own volition, such a step remains vanishingly unlikely. A forced removal looks almost as improbable.

"That would take a push from three senior figures, including Peter Mandelson and David Miliband," says one Cabinet minister. "And it's not going to happen". Nor is it true, as some reports suggest, that senior ministers are actively trying to destabilise him. [He’s doing that for himself -cs] 

Alistair Darling has so far remained impeccably loyal [except that he has publicly called for spending cuts! Loyal? -cs] , despite the fact that Mr Brown was not long ago so keen to eject him that the furniture removers were close to being despatched to No 11. When Jack Straw told me, in an interview, that the BP deal was linked to including the Lockerbie bomber in the prisoner transfer agreement with Libya, he was not – in my impression  [Easily impressed! -cs] – trying to make life harder for Mr Brown, or for himself.

There is no replay of the defiance shown by Tory grandees to John Major. We are seeing, instead, the muddle and disarray facing any government opting for evasion in an age of scrutiny.

At the centre of this mess is Mr Brown, who might be caricatured by his enemies as "sitting in his Nowhere Land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody". The PM is certainly "frustrated", as a senior aide puts it, that his strategies are getting nowhere. This week, the focus is on schools being opened and homes built.

Mr Brown also hoped to capitalise on the G20 signing up to maintaining the fiscal stimulus rather than favouring Tory belt-tightening. As a Number 10 insider says: "There will be big cutbacks, but further down the road." Meanwhile, domestic matters have been subsumed by Libya.

British foreign policy has been a murky business since Sir Henry Wotton remarked in the 16th century that "an ambassador is an honest man send to lie abroad for the good of his country". While no one has yet been caught lying, the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, who is dying of prostate cancer, has offered no masterclass in frankness or consistency. The latest gambit is a pirouette on pressing Tripoli to compensate IRA victims by Mr Brown, who I understand to think the Government was "in the wrong place" and the Foreign Office was "wrong not to support the [families'] campaign". [Brown contradicted himself 3 times and is still at it! -cs] 

The Megrahi furore might have faded if only the PM had made the case earlier and more powerfully for the dividends, in peace and safety, of house-training Gaddafi's rogue state. The Scots' release of Megrahi, if a little premature, showed a mercy that the British Justice Secretary would do well to extend to less high-profile prisoners on the point of death.  [I’m speechless at that inane paragraph! -cs]

There is a sense of victimhood even among the optimists surrounding Mr Brown. In the long term, his decisions will be vindicated,  [I somehow don’t think so! -cs] they say. Short term, all he ever gets is flak. The real problem is that the Government is so inured to failure that it can no longer vaunt success. Libya, which should be hailed as a triumph of diplomacy, [What?  Am I reading that right? -cs]   has been allowed to curdle into disaster. On Afghanistan, any breakthroughs, such as 5.6 million more children in school, are ignored because Mr Brown cannot convince the British public that his war aims are coherent or correct.  [Who invented those figures? Evidence please -cs] 

Yet many who opposed the Afghan war, as I did [How’s that for wanting to have it both ways? -cs] , think it would be wrong to cut and run. Few gainsay Mr Brown's decision to stay: not the Lib Dems, and certainly not the Tories, who want more troops and helicopters.

Number 10 is fuming that Afghanistan has been turned into a "political football" and increasingly alarmed at the failure to dent the Tories on public services and the economy. "We're the underdog, and the narrative is against us," says one senior figure.

As Mr Cruddas will say tonight, the reason for this malaise is New Labour's genesis as a good-time, do-good party reliant on growth and "the Croslandite idea of tax receipts". With the money gone, it must construct a new worldview centred on community, equality and a fairer, kinder society.

If only Labour could broaden its horizons and set out that vision, then the thinness of the Tory prospectus could be exposed. Mr Cruddas, with close links to Conservative backbenchers, an "unhappy bunch", thinks there are only "four or five" genuine progressives" in the party's upper echelons, of whom he assumes David Cameron is one. [ Mr Cruddas is hardy a definite source whose opinion matters -cs] 

The rest, he thinks, have Thatcherism hard-wired in their DNA, a disastrous view of Europe and a programme including privatisation, a minimal welfare state and housing policies that will crucify the less well-off.  [Nothing positive to say about the government so have a knock-about on the Tories. Pathetic -cs]  

Yesterday, a major Telegraph survey showed that Labour still polled better in the north [in fact if she’d bothered to read the figures the Tories according to the poll show a positive swing of 9% in the North against an 8,5% swing elsewhere.  So the little evidence there is,  shows exactly the opposite of what La Riddell claims. -cs] and that Mr Cameron, mistrusted by many voters, has a mountain to climb if he is to reach Number 10. Despite the PM's inauspicious start to autumn, Labour, now 13 points behind, has actually risen in the polls. [The ‘Poll of Polls’ shows Labour on 25,6%, almost the lowest polls have ever recorded for Labour -cs] 

Even so, [‘Because of this’ ??? =cs]  the party is edging close to panic. If leading Government figures think they are doomed to fight an unwinnable war abroad and an unwinnable election at home, matters are about to get a whole lot worse. Labour could still exploit the Tory weakness identified by voters, but only if it finds a new story. That requires not only the leader but his supine or silent ministers to kill off their branding as the nowhere party.

If they cannot extricate themselves from deathbed politics, then they face a fate summarised in the title of another Beatles hit. Good Night.