Johnson lies low as Hatty and Mandy slug it out

Is the Home Secretary the big winner after two weeks of "grandstanding" by Harman and Mandelson? Here's today's Journal column

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Last week, in the course of describing Peter Mandelson’s assumption of the reins of power in Whitehall, I made passing reference to talk of the former Hartlepool MP becoming Britain’s next Prime Minister.

At the time, the spate of “PM4PM” rumours doing the rounds struck me as no more than silly season tittle-tattle, and to be fair, the Business Secretary himself seemed keen to play them down.

But silly season or no, over the past seven days the story has both acquired ‘legs’ – as they say in the trade – and a fresh North-East dimension to boot.

According to at least two Sunday newspapers, a serious plot to install Lord Mandelson as Gordon Brown’s successor is already under way, with former Chief Whip Hilary Armstrong said to be playing a key role.

The plan, or so we are asked to believe, is for a leading Blairite Cabinet minister to stage what is being termed a “nuclear resignation” in the middle of Labour’s conference this autumn which would force Mr Brown out within hours.

Lord Mandelson would then take advantage of a new measure which became law this summer to allow life peers as well as hereditary peers to disclaim their titles.

At this point, Ms Armstrong, who has already announced she is standing down as MP for Durham North-West at the next election, would vacate her safe seat, allowing Mr Mandelson – as he would now be called - to stand in a by-election.

The one-time Prince of Darkness would then be duly returned to the Commons in good time to be installed as Labour leader and Prime Minister by Christmas.

Fanciful? Well, the fact that Peter Mandelson has even managed to get people talking about the idea of him as Prime Minister is surely proof that, in politics, nothing can ever be ruled out.

As the humourist and commentator Matthew Norman put it: “Even by the standards of Bob Monkhouse Syndrome, whereby the most reviled national characters inevitably come into vogue if they hang around long enough, this is some transformation.”

Either way, one politician who will have been looking somewhat askance at all this Mandy-mania is Harriet Harman, Labour’s nominal Number Two and Mr Brown’s official holiday stand-in.

She once again left us in no doubt this week that, if there were to be a vacancy at the top of the Labour Party in the near future, her hat remains very firmly in the ring.

First came her assertion that the party should never again be led by an all-male leadership team, on the grounds that men “cannot be left to run things on their own.”

Allied to this was the suggestion that men were effectively to blame for the recesssion, and that if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters we would not be in the mess we are in now.

There followed rumours of a spat with Justice Secretary Jack Straw and Home Secretary Alan Johnson, in which Ms Harman was said to have vetoed a review of rape laws because it did not go far enough.

Solicitor-General and Redcar MP Vera Baird attempted to pour oil on these troubled waters, but Ms Harman hit back again by telling Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour she would not “tippy-toe” around issues she believes in.

For Ms Harman, it’s a dangerous game. While few doubt that playing the ‘women’s card’ has got her a long way in the Labour Party, it has not always endeared her to the wider public.

Some elements of the party have been criticised in recent years for trying to re-launch the class war, but it has seemed at times this week as if Labour’s deputy is trying to start a gender war.

And if her pro-feminist agenda sometimes plays badly with floating voters in ‘Middle England,’ neither is it always overwhelmingly popular with Labour’s own core supporters.

Many Labour activists believe that all-women shortlists, for instance, have actually harmed equal opportunities by making it harder for black and Asian men to become Labour candidates.

What should Mr Brown make of all this “grandstanding?” Maybe he’s enjoying the spectacle of leadership wannabes vying for media attention as he himself takes a much-needed break.

Maybe there’s even an element of Machiavellianism in it, the kind of divide-and-rule strategy that his predecessor sometimes employed to good effect, setting Mr Brown, Robin Cook and John Prescott against eachother.

But while Mr Brown is undoubtedly devious enough to play such a game, he is not secure enough in his own job to be relaxed about such open jockeying for power among his subordinates.

If it carries on into the autumn, it risks the conference turning into a ‘beauty contest’ between the would-be successors, rather than the launch-pad for what would surely be the final Brown comeback bid.

But while Mandy and Harriet have been slugging it out across the airwaves and column inches over the past fortnight, one politician has been carefully staying out of the fray – Mr Johnson.

For all the bigging-up of Lord Mandelson over recent weeks, the Home Secretary is still the one the Tories most fear, the man whose common touch would instantly make David Cameron look like the privileged Old Etonian he is.

Mr Johnson has spent the last few weeks quietly liberalising the Home Office and neutralising ID cards as a potential election issue – both moves which will play well with Labour MPs in any contested leadership race.

Some will see his decision to lie low as evidence that he doesn’t really want the top job. But in so doing, perhaps he is showing the political astuteness which Harriet Harman so often lacks.

It's obvious who should succeed Gordon - and it's not Harriet Harman

Could Harriet Harman really become Prime Minister if Gordon Brown fell? Not if Labour wants to maximise its chances at the next election. Here's today's Journal column.

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One of the enduring truisms of British politics is that when it comes to choosing party leaders, Labour invariably chooses the obvious candidate while the Tories often opt for the unexpected.

By and large, it holds true. In each of the last four Labour leadership elections, the party has chosen the initial front-runner – successively Neil Kinnock, John Smith, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

By contrast, the status of early front-runner in a Tory leadership election is usually the kiss of death – as Michael Heseltine in 1990, Ken Clarke in 1997, Michael Portillo in 2001 and David Davis in 2005 all found to their cost.

It is tempting to think it has something to do with political worldview. While Tories are ruthlessly unsentimental by nature, Labour people seem more inclined to award the leadership on the basis of what used to be known as “Buggins’ Turn.”

But in the summer of 2007, the party did something mildly unpredictable. Not, of course, choosing Mr Brown as leader – that was as Buggins-ish a Labour appointment as they come.

No, their slightly leftfield choice – in more ways than one – was to select Harriet Harman as deputy leader over a field of candidates which included several nominally more senior figures.

If there was an “obvious” candidate in that election, it was probably Alan Johnson, at that time the education secretary and a man who had been seriously talked about as a potential alternative to Mr Brown for the top job.

That the Labour Party instead chose Ms Harman has subsequently led many observers to suggest that she would be the person to beat in any contest to succeed the Prime Minister.

It is not hard to fathom at least one of the reasons why Ms Harman had such substantial support among the party’s grassroots – her gender.

The party has a proud record of campaigning for greater gender equality and to give her her due, Ms Harman has been right in the forefront of that campaign for most of her political career.

Another reason for Ms Harman’s success was the fact that she managed to position herself in exactly the right place to win the election to be Mr Brown’s deputy – that is, very slightly to the left of the incoming PM.

This careful positioning ensured that she scooped up the second preference votes of the left-wing candidate, Jon Cruddas, enabling her to defeat Mr Johnson in the final run-off.

But there was one other very significant element of Ms Harman’s support in that 2007 contest which is less easily explained – the backing she received from key members of Mr Brown’s own inner circle.

Labour MPs who gave her their votes included Douglas Alexander, Yvette Cooper, Nigel Griffiths, Ed Miliband, Geoffrey Robinson, Michael Wills and two North-East MPs, Nick Brown and Kevan Jones.

Of course, it is quite possible that each of this eminent group of Brownites arrived independently at the judgement that Ms Harman was the best qualified of the candidates.

But that is not, historically, how Gordon’s gang have operated. They tend to hunt as a pack, taking their lead from the top and always acting in what they see as their man’s best interests.

So for me, the enduring mystery of the Harman election – especially in the light of all the subsequent rumours about her plotting to take over – is why the Brown camp wanted her as No 2?

The suspicion persists that it was primarily down to a desire to keep out candidates who would have been more of a threat – such as Mr Johnson or Peter Hain – along with those espousing a “Blairite” agenda, such as Hazel Blears.

It has been said by some that having encouraged his inner circle to back Ms Harman, Mr Brown then regretted it immediately.

If so, this would seem to be borne out by his decision to appoint her not as Deputy Prime Minister but instead to the relatively humdrum positions of party chair and Leader of the Commons.

Ever since then, Mr Brown has kept the post of deputy premier open, giving him the option of using it either to strengthen his Cabinet line-up or neutralise a potential rival.

That wily tactician John Major successfully achieved both when he elevated Mr Heseltine to the position in 1995.

The most likely beneficiary of such a manoeuvre in these circumstances would be Mr Johnson – but that would run the risk of triggering a full-scale revolt by Ms Harman’s supporters.

Ms Harman has already been cleverly positioning herself to the left of the collective government position on issues on which Mr Brown is vulnerable in his own party, such as bankers’ bonuses and the Royal Mail sell-off.

So could she really become leader and Prime Minister? Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t think so.

Okay, so she won the only contested leadership or deputy leadership election Labour has held in the past 15 years and, on the strength of that alone, it is impossible to write her off.

But if Mr Brown did fall, the party would in my view be focused on one thing and one thing alone – choosing the person most likely to give David Cameron a run for his money at the next election.

That person is not Ms Harman, but the “obvious candidate” she so narrowly beat: Alan Johnson.

The Harman Hypothesis

Much comment in the MSM and blogosphere alike today over the leadership chances of Harriet Harman as she stood in for Gordo at PMQS. The Sun reckons she's already plotting to take over, as does Andrew Rawnsley. Mike Smithson on Political Betting rates her chances, but Ben Brogan thinks she's already blown it. Iain Dale suggests Jack Straw could be in on the plot, while a thoughtful Tory perspective comes from new-kid-on-the-blog Alan Collins.

So what do I make of it? Well, if Harriet Harman is seriously being talked about as the answer to Labour's problems, it merely demonstrates the depth of the crisis the party is in.

Harman is political Marmite - she has her very strong admirers among a certain stratum of politically-correct London society - but she is not, and never has been, generally liked by the broader mass of the British public.

This did not really matter when Labour was choosing a deputy leader. The job of deputy is more about reassuring the faithful than reaching out to the uncommitted. But it will matter if and when the party comes to choose a new leader - particularly after their experience with Mr Brown.

I suspect that Harman knows this, and that her comment at PMQs about there not being enough airports for the men who would leave the country if she became PM displayed a certain degree of self-awareness.

Her primary objective in any leadership battle will be, firstly, to hold onto the deputy leadership - a generational shift in the leadership, for instance to David Miliband, could make her a casualty along with Gordon - and to secure the sort of senior role in the next Cabinet that Gordon has denied her.

I suspect her real aim is to be Justice Secretary rather than PM, but letting the speculation ride for a bit will do her no harm in this context, as it underlines her claims to be seen as a "key player" and strengthens her position for the inevitable job bargaining that will accompany a leadership change.

My guess is that she will eventually throw her weight behind the "Anyone but Miliband" bandwagon that appears to be growing and back the candidate most likely to give the Foreign Secretary a run for his money. As things currently stand, that surely means either Straw, or Alan Johnson.

More than 80pc of you say Harriet should go

Despite the current focus on Jacqui Smith - a sacrifical lamb if ever there was one - Harriet Harman is not yet quite out of the woods over the dodgy donations affair. My poll shows that 84pc of readers of this blog think she should resign and I reckon that is pretty close to where public opinion as a whole currently stands.

Clear favourite to replace her was Jon Cruddas with 38pc of the vote to 15pc for the next highest-placed candidate, Alan Johnson, 13pc for John Denham and 12pc for Hilary Benn but there appears to be much less interest in this potential contest, possibly reflecting the fact that after this summer's interminable marathon, we're all feeling a bit deputy-leadershipped-out.

Should Gordon hold a Night of the Long Knives?

I'm not going to claim this is an original thought. The idea came from a post on Paul Burgin's blog earlier today entitled "Accountablity" but I hope Paul will take it as compliment rather than as deliberate plagiarism if I say that I think the question merits further examination.

Paul's rather drastic solution to the Government's current troubles is to suggest that Gordon Brown should try to draw a conclusive line under the dodgy donations affair by sacking everyone involved, namely Harriet Harman, Peter Hain, Jack Dromey and Jon Mendelsohn. You would probably have to add Wendy Alexander to the list as well, though Paul doesn't mention her by name.

There are some obvious attractions to such a strategy, primarily that it would rid the Government and the party of a lightweight deputy leader and a treasurer who doesn't seem to know what day it is, let alone who has given the party money. But the key political question is: would it work, or would in fact serve to deepen Mr Brown's difficulties?

As I have said on Paul's blog, there are to my mind two major pitfalls with Nights of the Long Knives. Firstly, by sacking people you have only recently appointed, you call your own judgement into question. Secondly, some people know where so many bodies are buried that getting rid of them is likely to prove counter-productive.

Jack Dromey is a real case in point here. He was, of course, the man who blew the whistle on the cash for honours affair that hastened Tony Blair's departure, and if the Gospel according to the Blairites is to be believed, he was acting on the direct orders of Gordon Brown in so doing.

If this version of events is true, it makes Dromey unsackable, as the one man in British politics who could prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Brown plotted to bring down Blair.

On the more general point, while reshuffles have become a time-honoured way for Prime Ministers to "relaunch" their governments, recent history seems to suggest that the tactic very rarely works.

The best historical analogy would be Harold Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives in 1962 in which he sacked a third of his Cabinet - "the wrong third" as some commentators said at the time. It did him little good in the longer term, and caused one Tory MP to wryly observe: "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life."

Finally, it seems to me that if Gordon is looking for scapegoats for the current political mess he finds himself in, Messrs Harman and Hain are no more deserving of the sack than Ed Balls and Douglas Alexander.

It was they who really kicked off the current crisis by over-egging the speculation about an autumn election and whipping the media up into such a state of frenzy over it that it virtually guaranteed a backlash.

I do however think that Gordon could strengthen the government by making Jack Straw Deputy Prime Minister, as he should have been from the start, and by bringing back Alan Milburn as Minister without Portfolio to oversee some fresh thinking about a Labour fourth term, including a drive to improve social mobility.

The problem, in my view, with the Brown Cabinet is not that it contains too many incompetent minsters, so much as the fact that it contains too many kids.

Move over Darling

A couple of weeks' back I asked readers on this blog who should replace Alistair Darling as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Such has been the pace of events since then that Mr Darling now looks like one of the government's more secure ministers but for the record the result was:

George Osborne 39%

Vincent Cable 17%

Ed Balls 11%

Jack Straw 11%

John Denham 5%

David Miliband 5%

Ruth Kelly 1%

Alistair Darling should keep the job 12%

The most surprising thing about this was not that Osborne and Cable were ahead of all Labour contenders but that Ed Balls should be regarded as the leading alternative Labour Chancellor. I continue to believe that Balls has been overpromoted as he is and should go back to being a backroom boy, or preferably, to writing FT leaders.

Anyway, a new week, a new poll - or two to be precise: Should Harriet Harman resign, and if so, Who should replace her as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

Gordon should have called the police in himself

Ever since the start of the David Abrahams affair it has been as clear as day that the police would have to become involved eventually. So the question I am asking myself this morning is why Prime Minister Gordon Brown waited for the Electoral Commission and Chris Huhne to take the initiative on that, rather than calling in the Met right at the start of the week.

Brown knows he has nothing to fear personally from such an investigation, any more than John Major had any personal involvement in the Tory sleaze scandals of the mid-1990s. But instead of referring the matter to Scotland Yard himself as he should have done, he chose to set up a meaningless inquiry by Labour trusties Lord Whitty and Richard Harries.

If he had showed a bit more decisiveness on this, I think he would still be in a position to claim that he is the man to restore trust in British politics. By not doing so, I think he has finally forfeited that right.

As for Harriet Harman and those who have been apparently briefing the press on her behalf...she should realise that this is not about the survival of her pesky political career. What is at stake here is the survival of the only Labour government we've got.

Blair's poisoned legacy of sleaze

They say all is fair in love, war and politics - but am I the only person in the country who feels some sympathy for Gordon Brown over the fact that he is now reaping the whirlwind of a Labour Party funding scandal which was absolutely not of his own making?

Brown has been party leader and Prime Minister for five months. Yet everyone acknowledges that the origins of the David Abrahams affair go back four years.

There is one very important difference between this and both Northern Rock and Discgate. While both of those happened on Mr Brown's watch - and hence are things for which he has to take ultimate responsibility - the vast majority of the dodgy donations were made on his predecessor's.

So for David Cameron to suggest on the back of the affair today that the Prime Minister is not up to the job - without a shred of evidence directly linking him to it - is in my view deeply opportunistic.

It is true that Harriet Harman has been a fool not to check more closely where her deputy leadership campaign funds were coming from, but she was never the sharpest tool in the box.

Someone on another blog compared her to John Prescott the other day. Wrong. Prescott was a highly intelligent guy who was regarded as a bit thick because of his syntactical difficulties. When it comes to the density of porcine ordure, Harman is actually the genuine article.

People are saying there is much more of this story to come out, and I agree with Guido that the key to it probably lies in the government's sudden decision to lift its objections to Mr Abrahams' plans for a business park near Durham in October 2006.

Would it be uncharitable to point out that this decision was also taken under the stewardship of Mr Blair, at whose leaving party in Sedgefield Mr Abrahams was subsequently given a place of such honour?

Could we have another deputy leadership election?

I suspect that "God forbid!" would be the answer of most Labour Party members to that question, but the current pressure on Harriet Harman over the dodgy donations affair means the possibility cannot be ruled out.

So of the half-dozen candidates who stood last time round, who would risk throwing their hats into the ring again? Possibly only one or two, in my view.

Harman, of course, would automatically be ruled out. So too would Hazel Blears, Hilary Benn and Peter Hain on the grounds of their disappointing performances in June.

The only candidates from this summer's race I can see fancying another run round that particular block are Alan Johnson, pipped at the post by Harman after being widely tipped as the victor, and Jon Cruddas, who came a good third on the back of a strong grassroots campaign.

Cruddas turned down the offer of a job by Gordon Brown - there is some dispute as to whether it was a party vice-chairmanship or a junior ministerial post - and so is untainted by association with any of the disasters to strike the government over recent weeks. He could well win.

Johnson would also find it hard not to stand, having come so close before. But there would, I think, be other candidates.

The demographics of the Labour Party make it almost certain there would be a woman, with Caroline Flint, Ruth Kelly and Jacqui Smith among the possible contenders in the enforced absense of Harman and Blears.

I think Jack Straw would also fancy it. He expected to be made Deputy Prime Minister, or at the very least First Secretary of State, in Brown's first reshuffle, but the Prime Minister foolishly denied him both titles. He could not deny them were Straw to become deputy leader.

The big question, though, is whether one of the disgruntled Blairites would throw their hats into the ring - Charles Clarke, perhaps, or Alan Milburn, or even Foreign Secretary David Miliband?

If so, the media would very quickly try to turn it into a leadership election at one remove, and the attractions of Straw as a "unity candidate" would become even more apparent,

Could this be Jack's big moment? Although Brown will do all he can to save Harman, I fancy the Government would actually look stronger without her, with Straw officially installed as DPM and someone else entirely - Cruddas? - in the role of Party Chair.

Then again, Michael Heseltine's appointment to the same role in 1995 was supposed to strengthen John Major. And look how that ended.

From Two Jags to Five Hats

One admittedly rather processological story that caught my eye from earlier in the week concerned Harriet Harman's new self-proclaimed role as the "MPs enforcer."

Harman is quite right to see this as part of the role of a Leader of the House of Commons, but it doesn't sit especially well with her party role, leaving a further question mark against the wisdom of this particular appointment by Gordon.

The Tories have already taken to calling Harman "Four Hats" on account of her superfluity of titles - Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Party Chair, Leader of the House of Commons and Minister for Women.

In fact, she has five hats. They are forgetting Lord Privy Seal, a purely ceremonial role but an additional title nonetheless.

Not a good start for Harriet

I was genuinely pleased for Harriet Harman when she won the Deputy Leadership yesterday - she was by no means the worst of the six candidates - and some of the coverage of her victory today has been less than gallant.

The Lobby, as is its wont, seems to have collectively decided that Gordon's decision not to make her DPM was a calculated snub. Which it wasn't - he only ever intended to make the winner of this contest DPM if he had to, ie in the event of a runaway victory. The truth is that Alan Johnson wouldn't have become DPM on 50.4pc of the vote either.

All of that said, Harman's interview on the Today Programme this morning, in which she denied ever having called on the government to apologise for the war in Iraq, made her look both disingenuous and stupid - all the more so coming the day after she called for an "end to spin."

As can clearly be seen from this transcript of her earlier comments, she is quite clearly playing with words in a way that has previously brought New Labour into such disrepute. Poor show.

It wasn't just the womens' vote

Okay, so we got it wrong. Most of the pundits who have followed Labour's deputy leadership election contest over the past few weeks were split between predicting a victory for Hilary Benn, who came a bad fourth, and Alan Johnson, pipped at the post in second. Few anticipated a win for Harriet Harman, although in retrospect, perhaps we should have realised that what Gordon wants, Gordon usually gets in the end.

Some will no doubt be crowing over the fact that Guido was one of those who tipped Johnson, but at least he's had the good grace to acknowledge it. And having myself predicted a final ballot between Benn and Cruddas, with Benn emering victorious by 55-45, I am hardly in a position to talk.

Initial reaction to Harriet's victory tended to focus on the fact that party members clearly wanted a woman deputy, which is not surprising given that she made that her main campaign pitch. But I don't think that was the only reason she won.

What I think it demonstrates is that there was a natural majority in the party for the viewpoint most clearly represented in this contest by Harman and Jon Cruddas - that not everything the government has done has been perfect, and that the War in Iraq, in particular, was very far from being so.

In retrospect, the key moment of the campaign was the televised debate on Question Time, when Harman called for a government apology for the war and urged her supporters to make Jon Cruddas their second preference. From that moment on, there was never any doubt in my mind that one of them would make the last two.

I thought it would be Cruddas who would be ahead, and that Harman's votes would transfer to him. In the event, it turned out to be the other way round. Either way, it shows the desire for, at the very least, a change of tone on Iraq, and at the appropriate time, a change in policy too.