Times Online : And your prize, Gordon, is ... a poisoned chalice

And your prize, Gordon, is ... a poisoned chalice

by Michael Portillo | The Sunday Times | September 10, 2006

He could have stopped it with a click of his fingers. The former home secretary Charles Clarke will not be alone in reflecting bitterly that had Gordon Brown supported Tony Blair at the beginning of last week the Labour party could have avoided days of disastrous infighting.

The chancellor has performed incompetently. For years he has held back from staging a coup because he knew that Labour would be ungovernable afterwards. But now, without striking openly against his leader, he has shown himself to be untrustworthy. He remained silent too long, he was grudging in his belated statement of support on Thursday, and when he left a meeting with a beleaguered Blair, he was caught grinning more broadly than we had ever seen before.

Clarke has done more than merely add to the barrel of bile spewed from the Labour party last week. He has created a lasting image of Brown as slippery and unreliable. The chancellor is pigeonholed. Having stayed his assassin’s hand to the point of appearing irresolute, Brown has branded himself a traitor, almost as if he had wielded the dagger.

When Margaret Thatcher was brought down in 1990, the Conservative party had one other superstar: Michael Heseltine. But he was the principal culprit in her demise, and that was enough to deny him the leadership. Even those who had wanted her gone balked at rewarding the lead plotter.

When John Major unexpectedly resigned as party leader in 1995 and invited challengers, I did not offer myself for election, mainly because it would have been impossible to command the support of a new cabinet if I had busted apart the old one. Brown will find it difficult to lead a united government. Senior ministers know how much damage Brown’s surliness has done to Blair and to the government’s programme.

Once lost, party discipline is difficult to restore. Having deposed Thatcher, the Tory party has made each of her successors live on a knife edge. The Labour party will be the same. Disappointed Blairites will owe no allegiance to Brown. Some of them will relish his difficulties and the opportunity to humiliate him in retaliation for Blair’s treatment.

Labour backbenchers are now aware of what power they wield. Conventional wisdom had it that Labour did not depose its leaders in office. The textbooks must now be rewritten. Even the most successful and powerful premier in Labour’s history must take dictation from those deemed unworthy to hold salaried office, not so much the great unwashed as the great unpaid. That is bad news for Brown.

The rise of dissent against Blair can be mapped against two events: Labour’s decline in the opinion polls and the alignment of the government’s foreign policy with America’s.

The Labour party is massively too sensitive to the polls. Blair’s achievement of keeping the government ahead of the opposition for nine years is unparalleled. Thatcher consistently trailed Labour but moved ahead at election time. Labour MPs went soft during all those years that Blair led in the polls. Now pathetically they are in turmoil because they are somewhat behind the Tories, with three years or more remaining before an election.

If Brown is judged by the same criteria, he will not last long. It is the norm for the opposition to be ahead, but as Thatcher demonstrated, that does not foretell the next election result. It is likely that David Cameron will continue in front. After all, Labour appears to have a death wish and is now more interested in its own issues than the electorate’s.

The polls suggest that Cameron’s lead will grow when Brown takes over. The chancellor may enjoy a bounce in support on entering 10 Downing Street, as Major did, but he should no longer count on it.

Major was a breath of fresh air, because he was almost unknown. Brown is grimly familiar to us all. Major had a winsome smile. The chancellor’s resembles a fault line in Scottish granite.

Labour finally lost its patience with Blair over his support for Israel in Lebanon. Following the catastrophe of the Iraq war, it was the last straw. The pressure is on Brown to divorce himself from the United States. He has kept (disgracefully) silent on Iraq and Lebanon, so his options are open. But it would be amazing if he began his premiership by pulling out of Iraq (and/or Afghanistan), causing a breach with Washington. He could not easily put an honourable gloss on a British retreat.

Nor can we assume that the next US president will favour early troop withdrawal. It will be difficult for any presidential candidate to campaign as anti-war without appearing un-American. In any case, most of the presidential hopefuls have a track record of supporting the Iraq war.

So it is likely that Brown, struggling to control a party accustomed to flexing its muscles and from which he cannot demand loyalty, will trail in the polls, and will not reverse Blair’s unpopular foreign policy positions.

Supposedly, Brown longs to take on Cameron at prime minister’s questions. Perhaps he underestimates the task. The Tory leader is at ease in the house, and hits his target.

He makes good jokes, but unlike a predecessor, William Hague, he looks weightier than a student union debater enjoying his own wit.

Brown has no experience of taking unexpected questions on the whole range of government policies for half an hour. The chancellor answers only once a month, and shares the burden with four other ministers. The questions are on narrow subjects (eg, interest rates) published in advance, and all supplementary questions must be strictly on the same topic.

Should Cameron ever be short of ammunition, Clarke’s descriptions of Brown will come in handy: “absolutely stupid” and “lacks confidence”. Clarke says that there are instances in the chancellor’s behaviour that “build up to a terrible picture”. In extremis the Tory leader could quote Brown’s anonymous cabinet colleague who told the BBC that he would make “a f****** dreadful prime minister”.

For Cameron it will be a joy to know that each barb will drive Brown to fury, and make him brood again upon his host of grievances.

Ten years at the Treasury is not necessarily a good preparation for the top job. The chancellor is traditionally protected against meeting real people. For example, he decrees the budget of the National Health Service but is not obliged to receive delegations of doctors, nurses and patients.

The chancellor inhabits an ivory tower much more than the prime minister, and he may not enjoy descending from it. The Canadian finance minister, Paul Martin, chafed for a decade as the heir apparent.

He became premier at last, but then disappointed the electorate, who briskly threw him out.

When Thatcher was deposed, I was one of the last to urge her to fight on. On the day she made her decision to quit, I joined her and other friends at midnight in the cabinet room. The conversation turned immediately to the pressing matter of how to stop Heseltine from succeeding her. I expect that in 10 Downing Street there have been many similar conversations about Brown. But Blair will not enjoy Thatcher’s satisfaction from thwarting the rival.

The best card we had to play against Heseltine was that he could not be trusted, and that worked nicely. Clarke is using the same argument against Brown, but with this difference. There is no prospect of stopping him. So Clarke is merely blackening the name and blighting the premiership of Labour’s next leader. That demonstrates that Labour is in meltdown.

michael.portillo@sunday-times.co.uk