Ghost of Callaghan strikes again

With the election drawing ever closer, it is hard to say which of the three stories which have dominated the political agenda this week will have done Labour’s chances of a fourth term the most damage.

In a Budget week that was never going to be an easy one for the government, its cause was hardly helped by the revelations surrounding North Tyneside MP Stephen Byers last weekend.

The former Cabinet minister was forced into the humiliating position of having to refer himself to the parliamentary standards commissioner after describing himself as a “cab for hire” to an undercover reporter probing political lobbying.

As the headline on Monday’s Journal editorial succinctly put it: What a way to finish a political life.

By admitting that his initial claims to have persuaded Transport Secretary Lord Adonis to go easy on National Express after it defaulted on the East Coast rail franchise were fantasy, Mr Byers effectively fell on his own sword.

In one sense, he did the honourable thing. Not to have done so would have triggered a far bigger scandal that would certainly have forced Adonis’s own resignation.

Yet although Mr Byers is a politician who, in the words of the former rail regulator Tom Winsor, has an “ambiguous relationship with the truth,” there remains a nugget of suspicion that his claims may not have been entirely groundless..

The idea that he may have brokered a deal with Adonis over National Express does not seem all that fantastical to those of us who know how government really works.

By contrast with Mr Byers, Chancellor Alistair Darling is certainly not a man given to hyperbole or flights of fantasy – although he has occasionally been known to blow the whistle on his own government.

He did it when he spoke of Number 10 unleashing the “forces of hell” against him following a candid interview about the recession, and he did it again this week with his comments about the ‘Thatcherite’ scale of the cuts that will follow the election.

Given that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been at pains to underplay the extent of the cutbacks, this stark message from his next-door neighbour was about as off-message as it was possible to get.

It reveals once again the tensions between a Chancellor whose focus is on sorting out the public finances, and a Prime Minister more worried about political positioning.

Pre-election budgets are traditionally a time for giveaways, as Mr Brown demonstrated in 2005 with his announcement of a £200 council tax rebate for pensioners.

Any such rabbits-out-of-the-hat this time round would surely have got a belly laugh from a cynical electorate, and Mr Darling was surely right to resist them.

That said, by playing safe, the Chancellor added to the widespread impression of a government that has run out of ideas and is reduced to nicking them from the Tories, as with the stamp duty holiday for first-time buyers.

It had, in truth, a rather fin de siècle air to it – much as the demise of a man once thought of as a future Labour leader provides an apt metaphor for his party’s decline and fall.

But if there is one thing that has really damaged Labour this week, it is not Byers or the Budget, but the unions.

The strikes by BA cabin crew and now the RMT rail union have revived bitter memories of the dying days of the last Labour government in 1979, and are certain to lose the party votes.

Throughout his career, Gordon Brown has fought shy of the parallel with Jim Callaghan, the long-time Crown Prince forced to wait for No 10 by a more charismatic rival.

Once again, though, it seems Mr Brown’s destiny to follow in his footsteps.

Smeargate was a car crash waiting to happen

So much for cartoonist Slob's take on "Smeargate." Do I share his sense of nausea at the Adoration of the Guido that has followed the RedRag scandal and the defenestration of Damian McBride? Well, up to a point I guess.

Paul Staines is at least right in his analysis of the Lobby, although the initial diagnosis that it had become part of a client media was not Guido's, but Peter Oborne's, in his brilliant book The Triumph of the Political Class.

I myself watched it happening from close quarters and it became very obvious fairly early in my Lobby career on that you could not expect to receive help and favours from the New Labour machine if you also insisted on telling it like it was for the benefit of the readers who paid your salary.

I made my bed, and although those contemporaries of mine who took the Campbell spin subsequently saw all sorts of exciting career doors opening to them, I have never once regretted the road I took.

That said, there is a central hypocrisy at the heart of the Guido version of history that should not be overlooked. In my relatively limited personal dealings with Paul Staines, I have always found him to be an okay bloke - he even bought me a drink once - but when it comes to smear campaigns against rival politicians, his blog is the last word.

Back in 2007, Guido spent months attempting to convince his blog's many readers that Gordon Brown had been photographed on a rocking horse wearing a nappy, and to utilise the power of search engine optimisation and Google to spread this ridiculous tale across the entire internet. It even made it onto Wikipedia, and when I tried to remove it, some patsy came along and reverted my edit.

He also gave house-room to a sock puppet called "Stanislav" who suggested, in one particularly disgusting post, that the Prime Minister had been steadily driven mad by the strain of repressing his "homosexuality" over many years - part of a deadly serious attempt by the right to fix the idea of Gordon as a "weirdo" in the public's mind.

None of this in any way excuses the suggestion that David Cameron is suffering from some embarassing health complaint. But it does put it into perspective, and should serve as a corrective to those tempted to hail Guido as the new conscience of British public life.

Labour of course should have risen above all this. Instead, it set up LabourList, bringing in Derek Draper as editor despite the fact that his previous spell as a NuLab adviser had ended in embarrassing circumstances for the government. It was, in short, a car crash waiting to happen.

I disliked the idea of LabourList from the start. I was in fact invited to attend one of the breakfast sessions, and would have gone if I had been in London and at a loose end, but the whole thing seemed to me to be built on two false premises - firstly, the Dale Hypothesis that all left-wing blogs are basically crap, and secondly the Guido Hypothesis that smearing one's political opponents is a legitimate purpose of political blogging.

In other words, Labour thought they needed a Guido-style "attack blog" to take the fight to the Tories, and they concluded that none of the existing left-of-centre blogs was up to the job.

Had the party not got the first of these questions so catastrophically wrong, it would have realised that instead of trying to impose its command-and-control approach on the blogosphere, it would have been better off discreetly encouraging some of the excellent, well-established left-of-centre blogs that were already out there.

In short, instead of listening to Dolly Draper, they should have listened to Sunny Hundal. His post on Liberal Conspiracy is the best defence I have thus far read of the left-of-centre blogosphere and why Labour would have been better tapping into that rather than attempting to out-Fawkes the Tories.

Then again, New Labour has been ignoring its own natural supporters and trying to mimic the Conservatives ever since it was invented, so we should probably not be that surprised.

Meanwhile the issue of "spin" has once again become the issue that defines New Labour, the single word that I suspect will be associated with the Blair-Brown government long after everything else it did has been forgotten.

And those of us who thought Gordon would put a stop to all this nonsense have suffered another, perhaps terminal, disillusionment.

Second Home Secretary

The Louse of Whores

Like the UK Daily Pundit,I am snowed under at the moment - in my case trying to deal with the impact of the recession on the regional press industry - so blogging will continue to be light, though not non-existent, over the next few weeks.

I wish I had had the chance to post this week on the latest in the long and growing line of British political corruption scandals, and what it ought to tell us about the current method of choosing members of the Second Chamber, but you'll have to make do with this cartoon from Slob instead. Visitors of an overly squeamish disposition should perhaps look away now.

Haymaking while the tills ring

Hay-on-Wye is a gorgeously romantic little spot which can occasionally cause people to lose their heads somewhat...but even so, the behaviour of John Prescott and Michael Levy at the Hay Festival this weekend takes some beating when it comes to political mischief-making.

During a book-signing session for his autobiography, Prezza let it slip that he thought David Miliband would be a good leader of the Labour Party.

Although he made clear he was talking about the future rather than the present,his comments were predictably over-egged by the media into a story about possible alternatives to Gordon Brown.

Prescott has been in politics long enough to know that this was exactly what would happen, so just what exactly was he playing at here? Surely nothing as cheap and nasty as deliberately undermining the Prime Minister in order to garner a bit more publicity for his wretched book?

Meanwhile Lord Levy burnished his growing reputation for serial and gratuitous acts of disloyalty by opining that Gordon Brown "lacks Blair's way with people."

I have used this before, I know...but if ever there was anyone who needed to hear Clem Attlee's famous words of advice to Harold Laski, it is surely Levy. "I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome."

Is Prescott rewriting history?

Gordon Brown has not been a particularly lucky Prime Minister so far - while some of his mistakes have been of his own making, others, such as "discgate" and the David Abrahams affair were down to others' incompetence. But looking at the headlines of the last couple of days, I wonder whether the Prime Minister is perhaps more fortunate in his enemies.

Who are these people who are currently twisting the knife? An ex deputy leader who was very lucky not to be sacked himself by Tony Blair, a failed ex welfare minister who has borne a deeply personal grudge against him for the past decade, and a sleazy fundraiser whose activities did more than anyone else to bring disgrace on the party.

The activities of Lord Cashpoint in persistently seeking to link Brown with the cash for honours affair on the strength of absolutely no evidence are simply beneath contempt. It's the kind of thing you expect from Tory bloggers, not people who are allegedly supporters of the Labour Party.

As for Frank Field, he has been seeking to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of Labour MPs by spearheading the rebellion over the abolition of the 10p tax rate, but such is the depth of his hatred for Gordon that anything he says about him is worthless.

John Prescott is a different case altogether. His loyalty to the party and determination to hold it together at all costs has been the hallmark of his long career, which is what makes the revelations about the Blair-Brown feud in his memoirs all the more surprising.

I wonder if he is re-writing history somewhat. Either that, or else his words are being rather badly edited.

In truth, I don't think for a moment he actually wanted Tony to sack Gordon or for Gordon to resign and attack Tony from the backbenches. Prescott knows perfectly well that both of those scenarios would have led to civil war in the party, and that is not something which he would ever have wanted.

I think his comments have more the air of exasperation about them. If he did indeed urge Blair to sack Brown, it was probably said more as a reductio ad absurdam than anything else.

Contrary to the impression given in the book, I am in fact as certain as I can be that he wanted Brown to succeed Blair, saw him as the best guarantor of the Labour Party's core values, and was working quietly to ensure his succession from a fairly early stage.

Indeed I was told all of this by one of Prescott's very closest ministerial colleagues shortly after the 2001 election.

The same source made clear that Prescott envisaged continuing as Brown's deputy for a while, presumably on the assumption that the handover would come sometime in the 2001-2005 Parliament.

Blair's decision to stay on until 2007, coupled with the Tracey Temple affair, evidently put paid to that ambition.

Cameron and Clegg v the system

My Saturday column in today's Newcastle Journal takes as its theme the current controversy over MPs expenses and the conduct of House of Commons business generally and the way in which both David Cameron and Nick Clegg have both sought to exploit that.

As the more perceptive observers of Tory politics have already noted, Mr Cameron is clearly seeking to position himself in the vanguard of a growing public desire for the modernisation of our political institutions. So, too, in his different way, is Mr Clegg.

In this sense they are both "running against Westminster" in the same way that Barack Obama and to a lesser extent John McCain are running against their own party establishments.

It's not good news for Gordon Brown, who fluffed the opportunity to seize the reform mantle last summer by bringing forward a rather timid constitutional reform package, long before the "dodgy donations" affair put paid to his ambitions to restore trust in British politics.

The only way is down

Little time tonight for any more detailed blogging on the Peter Hain story but I've not departed from my view that the real reason he's finished is because he spent 200 grand coming fifth behind Harriet Harman in the deputy leadership contest. However things pan out with the donations story, Hain has been living on borrowed political time ever since that dismal result and the only way is down from now on.

Justin McKeating expresses this rather more bluntly, on Chicken Yoghurt:

"Two hundred grand to be beaten in a popularity contest by Harriet bloody Harman? If I was him, I wouldn't be wondering if it was worth carrying on in politics, I'd be pondering whether it was worth carrying on living."

I also strongly agree with James Forsyth on Coffee House that Brown's attempt to dress-up this morning's Sun article as a "vote of confidence" when in reality he has left Hain swinging in the wind hardly shows the Prime Minister in his best light.

As I have previously advocated, if he showed some decisiveness, fired Hain and offered his job to Alan Milburn, he could yet salvage something from this situation.

My review of 2007

For the past 10 years, I have written a review of the political year for the Newcastle Journal. This year's was published yesterday, and here it is in full.

***

Eventful? The political year 2007 was certainly that. Entertaining? Well, that too – if you are the kind of person who enjoyed seeing Gordon Brown fall flat on his face, that is.

But as for epoch-making – only time will tell if 2007, or 6 October, 2007 to be precise, will go down as one of the great turning points of modern political history.

That was the day that Mr Brown finally resolved the question that had dominated the agenda ever since he had taken over as Prime Minister in June - whether or not he would hold a general election.

His decision not to go to the country changed the political weather at a stroke and left Labour on the defensive for the first time in 15 years.

The widespread public reaction to the decision was that a government that appeared to have so little confidence in itself certainly did not deserve the confidence of the voters.

Suddenly, a Labour Party which had carried all before it for a decade and a half began to look like losers.

The mistake, though, did not lie in the decision itself. Despite his earlier surge in popularity, by October the polls clearly showed the best Mr Brown could have hoped for was a hung Parliament.

No, it was in having allowed the speculation and planning to get so wildly out of control beforehand that the eventual cancellation could only be seen as a humiliating retreat.

The first few months of the year had been dominated by the endgame of the long Tony Blair premiership, played out against the grisly backdrop of the “cash for honours” inquiry.

In the event, no charges were brought, but the stench of sleaze would hang over the Labour Party long after the men from Scotland Yard had departed.

But the background story of the spring was not so much whether there would be charges, as whether there would be a challenge – namely to Mr Brown for the Labour leadership.

For a time, it seemed that South Shields MP David Miliband was the chosen one - not least in Mr Blair’s eyes – but he wisely decided that discretion was the better part of valour.

Mr Blair had stayed on, apparently with Mr Brown’s acquiescence, in order to “take the hit” for what were expected to be disastrous local and Scottish election results in May.

In the event these were every bit as bad as anticipated, with Alex Salmond’s SNP overtaking Labour to become the dominant force in the Scottish Parliament.

After what had seemed like the longest farewell tour since Frank Sinatra, the outgoing Prime Minister finally said his goodbyes with a bravura performance at his last Commons Question Time.

It was followed swiftly by his resignation as MP for Sedgefield to take up a new role as a Middle East peace envoy, though the irony of this seemed lost on most observers.

After such a long spell at 10 Downing Street, it was remarkable how little Mr Blair was initially missed.

An attempted terrorist attack, a spate of summer floods, and even a foot and mouth outbreak were all calmly and competently dealt with by Mr Brown and his new-look Cabinet team.

Even when the global “credit crunch” led to the first run on British bank in 150 years – Newcastle’s very own Northern Rock – the Government acted swiftly to cool the situation by agreeing to guarantee investors’ savings.

Consequently Labour went into the autumn conference season on a big high, with one poll showing a snap election would give them a majority of 134.

But the mood began to change after Mr Brown’s closest aide, Ed Balls, speculated openly on whether “the gamble” lay in going now, or delaying – with the clear implication that the bigger risk lay in delay.

From this, it became clear that uppermost in Mr Brown’s election calculations was not the long-term good of the country, but short-term party advantage.

His subsequent non-announcement created a new political narrative in which a government that had seemed destined to succeed appeared instead to be doomed to failure.

And as if to confirm that view, the government then found itself buffeted by a whole series of mishaps – all of them made and manufactured in the North-East.

First, the Northern Rock crisis blew up again, with questions over whether the £25bn of taxpayers’ money spent propping up the bank would be repaid. The outcome may yet be nationalisation.

Then it emerged that a computer disc had gone missing from the Revenue and Customs office in Washington containing the personal details of 25m child benefit claimants.

Finally, Labour sleaze reared its head again after it emerged that a Newcastle businessmen, David Abrahams, had used intermediaries to give money to the party in breach of the rules on donations.

Within a few short weeks, Mr Brown’s long-awaited inheritance had turned to dust and ashes in his hands.

The turnaround in Tory leader David Cameron’s fortunes was no less dramatic. Earlier in the year he had been vilified for going to Rwanda while floods devastated his constituency and for bungling a policy shift on grammar schools.

But he was rescued by Mr Brown’s dithering and an ace-in-the-hole from his Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, who pledged to scrap inheritance tax for all estates under £1m.

Ironically, Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell had made probably the best speech of the conference season - but much good did it do him.

Within a month he was gone, citing the media “obsession” with his age, to be replaced after the closest-fought leadership contest of modern times by the 40-year-old Nick Clegg.

Mr Brown ends the year in a deep, deep hole, with opinion polls now consistently showing a Tory lead of 10-15pc.

The Prime Minister is nothing if not resilient, but his government, of which Labour supporters had such high hopes, has thus far been a huge disappointment.

Where he promised quiet competence, there has been only ineptitude. Where he promised “vision” there has been only drift. Above all where he promised to restore trust in politics it has been dragged only further into the mire.

Can he turn it around? That’s the question for next week’s column, when I’ll be looking ahead to what we can expect the political year 2008 to bring.

Spot on, Sir John

Sir John Major is spot-on with his comments about the difference between Tory sleaze in the 1990s and Labour sleaze now. And rather than bluster on about how useless a Prime Minister Major was, Labour people ought to have the good grace to accept it.

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.

Brown's lost mission to restore trust

On a day on which even loyalist Labour commentators are openly discussing the succession to Gordon Brown, my column in the Newcastle Journal will probably seem kinder to the Prime Minister than some. Nevertheless, I too conclude that one of the key aims of his premiership, that of restoring trust in British politics, is now almost certainly holed below the waterline.

"It is a very sad conclusion for those of us who hoped Mr Brown could offer a fresh start, but it is going to be hard if not impossible for him to do that now. Voters are starting to conclude that the job of restoring trust in British politics will require not just a change of leadership, but a change of government."

As I said on this blog earlier in the week, it's all very unfair- but then again so was Labour's treatment of poor John Major in the mid-1990s when he was crucified for the sins of others in his party.

The column can be read in full on my companion blog, HERE.

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.

About time too

By choosing today to announce a pledge to reform the honours system to reward unsung heroes in the week following the conclusion of the loans-for-lordships investigation, Gordon Brown couldn't really be making it any clearer that he intends to conduct his government in a very different way from Tony Blair.

There will, in any case, be no more coronets for cash, at least under Labour. Reform of the House of Lords to bring in a 100pc elected second chamber will, I am confident, be a Labour manifesto pledge at the next election, and if Gordon wins, the backwoodsmen who have fought for 100 years to retain this vestige of the feudal system will finally be forced to admit defeat under the Salisbury Convention.

But while Gordon is at it, he really should go much further in dismantling an honours system which is rooted in the days of Empire and which, in its absurd hierarchy of categories, still helps to perpetuate the class divide in British society.

It's all very well to hand out honours to Britain's "Everyday Heroes," in the words of Mr Brown's latest book. But not if that means that lollipop ladies and local charity fundraisers are still awarded MBEs while senior civil servants continue to collect their KCMGs (otherwise known as Kindly Call Me God).

Another whitewash

Did I believe there was no connection between Alastair Campbell's desire to "fuck Gilligan", the leaking by government officials of Dr David Kelly's name to that end, and the weapons inspector's subsequent suicide? No, I didn't, despite what Lord Hutton told us.

And like Guido, neither do I believe there has never been a connection between donations to the Labour Party and the award of peerages, even if nothing was ever written down on paper about it in a way that would have enabled the Crown Prosecution Service to prove that a specific crime had been committed.

I have one simple question on all this: If no-one at No 10 had anything to hide, why did they seek to obstruct the inquiry at every turn, turning what could have been a routine investigation into one that eventually lasted 16 months and cost £800,000 of taxpayers' money?

I don't think the public will be any more convinced by this than I am. Maybe, as with the case of Lord Archer, we will just have to wait a decade or more for the truth to out.

The Great Polluter

And so, at last, to Alastair Campbell's Diaries. Gordon Brown said he didn't know why they were being published, a pretence at incomprehension which is a well-known and very effective political technique. Campbell himself said in the course of a 30-minute interview on the Today Programme of the type ususally reserved for serving Prime Ministers that he hoped the diaries would provide "the first chapter of a record that I intend to put into the public domain about an amazing prime minister, a great leader in my view, who was responsible for taking Labour into power and taking Britain forward."

To which I have only two words to say. My Arse.

The reason Alastair Campbell is publishing his diaries now is not the desire to write the rough first draft of history of the Blair Years. It is filthy lucre, and the fact that he knows that had he waited a couple of years, we would all have forgotten about him and no-one would buy them. That is also why he has taken out the references to Gordon Brown - so he can make another fortune in a few years' time by publishing those bits once Brown has left office.

Then again, what more should we expect? As Michael Howard said on
Newsnight, Alastair Campbell has done more than anyone else to pollute the political process and destroy public trust in our democracy over the past few years, so why should we expect him now to be driven by any higher motive than selfish greed?

As to the book's contents, I have already said my piece in the latest edition of the Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze about his self-justificatory and disingenuous account of the David Kelly affair. I still cannot believe that Campbell can say, in the same breath, that he briefly considered topping himself over the episode, while continuing to maintain he did absolutely nothing wrong.

It goes without saying that I am not going to buy the book. I would recommend instead the excellent biography Alastair Campbell: New Labour and the Rise of the Media Class by Peter Oborne, which will tell you all you need to know about Campbell's media management techniques and the reign of terror he exerted over Whitehall press departments and the Parliamentary Lobby between 1997 and 2003.

The publication of the Campbell Diaries, and the extraordinary way in which the BBC has allowed itself to become his publicity machine, has already produced some superb blogging and commentary elsewhere, notably from Martin Kettle who is puzzled by the absence of references to Campbell's media collaborators Tom Baldwin and Trevor Kavanagh, and Chicken Yoghurt, who likens the book to another featuring "fantastical plots requiring a massive suspension of disbelief from the reader" - Harry Potter.

Top biscuit however goes to Septic Isle for this post on Obsolete which deserves to be read in full, not least for the full impact of some ace swearblogging. "As any psychologist will tell you, a pathological liar not only lies to everyone around him, they lie the most to themselves....They say cheats never prosper, but liars it seems will inherit the earth."

Don't judge a Big Red Book by its cover

The latest edition of the Big Red Book of New Labour Sleaze is published tomorrow. I was pleased to have played a part in the original version and to have been asked to contribute a further piece to this new edition.

I am, however, somewhat disappointed by the decision of the publishers to feature a picture of Gordon Brown with his trousers down on the cover, especially in view of the timing of the publication to coincide with the start of his premiership.

New Labour Sleaze was the result of the amoral approach to politics adopted by Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and a few others. To attempt to tar Gordon with the same brush is not just grotesquely unfair, but disingenuous.

I think that over the next few weeks and months the public will begin to realise that far from being part of the sleazy old gang, the incoming Prime Minister is a very different kettle of fish from his discredited predecessor.