By PETER OBORNE During their final months in office, it is not unusual for prime ministers to find themselves tired, written off and doomed to almost certain defeat at the next General Election. This is the situation now facing Gordon Brown and it poses an enormous test of character in many different ways. On the one hand, a leader in his dying days at No10 needs to find the inner strength to give hope to his followers that all is not lost, even though privately he may feel only a deep sense of despair. The Prime Minister, pictured in the December issue of GQ magazine, is not following the example of other PMs who have faced defeat At the same time he must find a way of coping with the profound personal unpopularity which never seems to budge, like an immovable black cloud. Toughest of all, he has to make an important moral choice about the way he governs. When all seems lost, it must be very tempting for an outgoing prime minister to act in a selfish and partisan way to try to save his own skin - or alternatively to malevolently leave a poisoned legacy for his successor. Continuing to follow policies which are in the country's interests can seem hard when they will offer no political dividend for the doomed PM. Indeed, the opposite is often the case because, as now with Gordon Brown, it is his opponents who are most likely to benefit from any recovery in the country's political and economic fortunes. As a general rule, most prime ministers have emerged magnificently from this dilemma. The example of Jim Callaghan in the winter of 1978/9 is most telling. We have since learnt that he privately realised that Margaret Thatcher's Tories were bound to win the next General Election. Yet Sunny Jim showed huge fortitude. It would have been easy for him to have added to the problems that the Conservatives would inherit on taking office by embarking on a pre-election spending spree. Callaghan and his Chancellor Denis Healey, did the exact opposite. They ordered a series of spending cuts that split the Labour Party and therefore damaged its fading chances of re-election. Indeed, some historians now claim that it was the responsible economic management of Callaghan and Healey in the late 1970s, as much as the early policies of Margaret Thatcher and her Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, that put Britain on the path of economic recovery. Former Prime Ministers James Callaghan and John Major ordered a series of cuts just before they lost their respective general elections in 1979 and 1997 The conduct of John Major in his final months in office in 1996/7 is another case in point. At some personal cost, he set in motion the process of reconciliation in Northern Ireland that eventually brought peace to the province. Yet it was his successor, Tony Blair, who got the credit for this brave initiative. Indeed, Blair has never yet acknowledged the debt. John Major did not act to obtain any personal or party advantage, but simply acted because he believed it was the right thing to do. More remarkable was Major's handling of the economy. Like Callaghan in 1979, there was no pre-election vote-catching spending spree. On the contrary, Major and his Chancellor Kenneth Clarke risked unpopularity by imposing sharp cuts. The beneficiary of this prudent economic management, however, was not the Conservatives. Instead, it was the incoming New Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown. At one of his earliest meetings at the Treasury, officials spelt out to Brown the healthy state of the economy he had inherited. In reply, Brown rudely retorted: 'What do you want me to do? Send a thank-you letter?' Failed politician Baroness Amos has recently been appointed High Commissioner to Australia And it was Brown who claimed the credit for the fact that the strength of the economy allowed him to boost spending on schools and hospitals, without ever acknowledging that the conditions for his success had been set by the prudence of Major and Clarke. Today, 13 years on, Gordon Brown now finds himself in a similar position to John Major. He, too, faces election defeat. But there is no sign of the magnanimity and sense of public duty shown by either Jim Callaghan or John Major. Very much the opposite: it now looks very much as if he has launched what some Whitehall officials describe a 'scorched-earth policy'. Rather than do the right thing by Britain, he seems to want to make sure that David Cameron will face the worst possible inheritance if he wins the election next spring. For instance, Brown has been appointing Labour cronies to key posts. Recently, the job of High Commissioner to Australia became vacant. Instead of choosing a highranking Foreign Office diplomat for the post, Brown rewarded a failed Labour politician, Baroness Amos. Similarly, Lady Ashton (Labour's former leader in the Lords and a figure of little consequence) has been appointed to the vital post of trade commissioner in Europe. Narrow considerations of Labour Party control of the levers of power dictated these appointments and certainly not the national interest. But Gordon Brown's most palpable act of political selfishness concerns his economic policy. Next year the national deficit is set to rise towards £200billion, a figure without precedent in our history. Meanwhile, the overall debt, which stood at barely £500 billion when Brown became prime minister, is set to surge well over £1 trillion. And these are just the Treasury's most optimistic estimates. True debt figure, as a brilliant paper for the Centre for Policy Studies by Brooks Newmark showed last month, is far, far worse and stands at more than £2trillion. These figures are unsustainable and have to be tackled now if national bankruptcy is to be avoided. Yet, shamefully, Brown has failed to take any action to deal with this crisis. Shockingly, government officials leaked information to some newspapers last week saying that the autumn pre-budget report due to be published next month will not be a much-needed austerity package, but will include plans to spend more money. It is easy to see why Brown is behaving in this way. His personal position as party leader remains vulnerable and he naturally does not want to antagonise Labour MPs by proposing spending cuts. Terrified of a wipe-out at the General Election, Labour strategists cynically hope that such bribery of voters will prevent a bloodbath. The contrast of this behaviour with the dignified and honourable conduct of John Major and Jim Callaghan in their final months in office could not be greater. The truth is that Gordon Brown is now governing Britain purely for partisan or even personal advantage rather than in the national interest. In doing so, he hopes that David Cameron, and not the Labour Party, will attract all the public vitriol and hatred that always results from spending cuts. Gordon Brown's only motivation in office now seems to be to try to guarantee that Britain is ungovernable if Cameron wins power. Not only is this tactic reckless and shameful, it means that the British people will pay a devastatingly high price for the last six months of Brown's profligate government. This morning I will be presenting a special anniversary programme about the world's longest-running political radio show, BBC Radio Four's Week In Westminster. It was first broadcast on November 6, 1929, when Ramsay MacDonald was prime minister and a week after the start of the Wall Street crash. Initially the programme was presented only by women MPs. The producer explained the policy in a letter to Nancy Astor, the first woman to sit in the Commons. He said: 'We are plunging into a new experiment by having women MPs give a simple, introductory talk on the week in Parliament, every Wednesday morning at 10.45 - the time that busy working women can listen best, when they have their cup of tea.' The programme's researchers have also discovered that Soviet spy Guy Burgess once worked as the programme producer. Apparently, he often walked from Broadcasting House around the corner to St Ermin's Hotel, where he photographed secret documents before handing them to his Kremlin controllers. Michael Martin, who was forced out of the Commons Speaker's chair last May, degraded his office in many ways. Last week he did so again when answering questions from a Commons committee about his decision to allow the police to raid the parliamentary office used by the Tory MP Damian Green while investigating alleged Home Office leaks. Rather than take the blame himself, Lord Martin pointed the finger at his two officials - clerk of the Commons Malcolm Jack and the Serjeant-at-Arms Jill Pay. This buck-passing was disgraceful. Neither official is in a position to defend themselves publicly. Most important, the decision to allow the unprecedented police raid was taken by Martin alone. Only a very weak man would ever try to dodge the blame by shuffling off the responsibility on subordinates.You may be doomed, Mr Brown, but stop dragging us down too
Last updated at 11:03 PM on 06th November 2009
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