SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
6.9.09
Gordon Brown's damning character flaws have been laid bare
Evasive, indecisive and unpersuasive - how can such a Prime Minister govern, asks Matthew d'Ancona.
Matthew d'Ancona
Suddenly below par and feeling pain in his joints last Monday, David Cameron feared he was about to succumb to swine flu. Would he find himself an invalid for a few precious days he could ill afford in the run-up to the party's conference next month?
False alarm, as it turned out. Instead, Dave was able to take a healthy interest in the unfolding of a seven-day case study of two particular characteristics which have made it next-to-impossible for Gordon Brown to be an effective Prime Minister. By mid-week, one senior Cameroon was shaking his head in gleeful disbelief at the headlines: "I keep thinking: 'These are the sorts of disasters that we used to have a monopoly on.' And then I realise it's Labour, not us." One Cabinet minister gave me this pithy assessment: "We're not even back from recess yet, and already it's a disaster."
The first Brown characteristic is the evasiveness that earned him the nickname "Macavity" when he was Chancellor. In his decade at the Treasury, his capacity to absent himself from the scene of the crime or the epicentre of the explosion infuriated Tony Blair but was often, politically, very useful indeed to Gordon. You can behave like that – just – when you are Chancellor. But not when you are Prime Minister.
Brown certainly gave it a go, engaging in a long, slippery and epically equivocal campaign to avoid pronouncing on the Scottish executive's decision to release the Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds. Before last Wednesday, Mr Brown's public position on this appalling betrayal of those who died in the 1988 terrorist atrocity and their relatives was essentially: "Search me, guv, I'm only the Prime Minister… not my department. You want the Appeasing Dictators Helpline… No, this is my lunch-break." Etc.
Only when the release of official documents connected to the Megrahi case made it all too clear that the PM had been quietly opposed to the terminally ill terrorist dying in prison was Mr Moral Compass obliged to 'fess up. "I respect the right of the Scottish ministers to make the decision, and the decision," he said in a statement four days ago. Yes, Number 10 explained, this did mean he endorsed Megrahi's release.
I think this was a vile betrayal of the 270 people who died 21 years ago in the explosion of Pan-Am flight 103, and their grieving families. But I also understand that every Government has to take decisions in the national interest that make ministers – let alone the public – feel like losing their lunch. It's called realpolitik and every nation on earth practises it. So does every political party, no matter how pure in its publicly-stated dimension. This is why Robin Cook, as Foreign Secretary, did not, as is so often wrongly claimed, commit Labour to an "ethical foreign policy" but to a foreign policy with an "ethical dimension" – an altogether different proposition. I mean, let's face it: if you subject a suspect to waterboarding but then help him tumble dry his clothes, there's an "ethical dimension" in there somewhere, isn't there?
In a situation such as the Megrahi case, there is no cunning third way, and certainly no chance – Gordon's preferred option – that you can say next to nothing and hope that everyone will forget about it. Indeed, all that you do by declining to say what you think, is to prolong the story. Blair understood this. In December 2006, his government announced that the Serious Fraud Office had dropped a corruption inquiry into a BAE arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The then prime minister justified this deeply controversial decision on the grounds of national security and our geopolitical "strategic interest". Inevitably, this argument made many people very cross indeed. But it was at least clear and decisive.
Contrast Brown's vain belief that he could get away with postponing the question indefinitely, sidestepping it forever. And then think back to his catastrophic mishandling of the election-that-never-was two years ago, his lengthy and very public indecision, and – worst of all – his insistence that his decision (when it finally came) not to go to the country had nothing to do with the opinion polls. Having tried to hide from the voters, he then insulted their intelligence: about as bad as it gets.
The second Brown character pathology on display last week was rather more nuanced and complex, but no less important: namely, his failure to become a teacher-politician, a leader capable of explaining to the voters what he or she is up to, and why. All politicians have their own theology. But many who come a cropper do so because they cannot translate that theology into a popular religion.
When I travelled to America with Brown in the summer of 2007, shortly after he became Prime Minister, it was clear that he was thinking very deeply about Britain's role in "Af-Pak". Yet, in the past two years, Brown has been quite unable to get across his message and answer the question (adapting Norman Mailer): "Why are we in Afghanistan?"
His speech on Friday at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London made some good points. "If the insurgency succeeds in Afghanistan," the PM said, "al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups will once again be able to use it as a sanctuary to train, plan and launch attacks on Britain and the rest of the world." Just so. But – about the worst thing one can say of a speech – it is more convincing in print than when Gordon said it. He sounded like a Speak Your Weight machine desperately trying to be a Nintendo Wii.
Worse yet, General Gordon's Big Rhetorical Surge had been sabotaged in advance by the resignation of Eric Joyce, PPS to the Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth. Scarcely a mortal blow, it is true. But hugely embarrassing that such a staunch advocate of the Iraq conflict – few Labour MPs did as much broadcasting to support the Government over that war – should now quit because of what he sees as the terrible mismanagement by politicians of a just and noble military mission. Mr Joyce's resignation letter was a withering critique of a Government that has been reduced to "behind-the-hand attacks" on generals, that has not convinced the public that "we give [our servicemen's] well-being the highest political priority", that has denied the voters the "more direct approach" to which they are entitled. The fact that Mr Joyce is little known is neither here nor there. What matters are the accuracy of the charge sheet, and his identification of a spectacular failure of public diplomacy.
Evasive and unpersuasive: forced to speak out on Lockerbie; talking to the hand, not the face, on Afghanistan. So much for Gordon. For now, Dave looks on. But a year from now, such problems, and countless others like them, will be his.
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