'Causes of crime' come back to haunt Labour

For 1993 read 2010. For James Bulger, read the Edlington victims. And for Tony Blair's "tough the causes of crime," read David Cameron's "broken society." Here's today's Journal column.

---

It seems a long time ago now, but there was a time when law and order - or ‘Laura Norder’ as it was more commonly known - was regarded as what political commentators call a ‘Tory issue’

By that they meant that, whenever crime featured as a big issue in the public consciousness, the Tory vote would tend to go up – just as Labour’s vote tended to rise whenever the health service was in the headlines.

One dramatic news event, however, changed all that. The horrific murder of toddler James Bulger in 1993 understandably sparked a bout of national agonising about the kind of society the Tories had created over the preceding 13 or 14 years.

The beneficiary was an up-and-coming Labour frontbencher by the name of Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, whose famous soundbite “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” encapsulated the changed national mood.

The repercussions are still being felt today. It is arguable that without the higher profile afforded him by the Bulger case, Mr Blair would never have eclipsed his older rival Gordon Brown in the subsequent battle for the Labour succession.

Be that as it may, tackling the causes of crime and anti-social behaviour has remained a core part of the New Labour agenda ever since.

Nearly two decades on, though, the political wheel has turned nearly full circle. Now it’s Labour that has been in power for 13 years, and Labour that must try to explain the deeper social malaise behind an almost equally horrific case.

David Cameron has often been accused of modelling himself on Mr Blair – but
commentators can surely be forgiven for drawing the comparison again after yesterday's speech by the Tory leader on the Edlington attacks.

Ever since he became Tory leader in 2005, Mr Cameron has attempted to paint a picture of what he sees as Britain’s “broken society,” casting himself in the role of healer.

However Labour has tried to dismiss the idea as, at best, a caricacture, and at worst, a slur on the decent hard-working, law-abiding families who make up the vast majority of the population.

Yesterday’s political exchanges saw that debate played out in microcosm. Mr Cameron said the case of two young boys tortured in Doncaster was not an "isolated incident of evil" but symptomatic of wider social problems.

Openly comparing the case to that of James Bulger, he said it should cause people to ask themselves: “What has gone wrong with our society and what we are going to do about it?"

Labour, in turn, accused Mr Cameron of "tarring" the people of Britain by "seizing on one absolutely horrific crime, with Treasury minister Liam Byrne branding the speech “unpleasant.”

Part of Labour’s objection to the phrase “broken society” is that it is, in a sense, a contradiction in terms, that the word “society” implies the existence of the kind of shared values and community spirit that Mr Cameron is suggesting is absent.

But the biggest question Labour has to answer is why after 13 criminal justice bills and the creation of more than 3,000 additional offences since 1997, we appear to be no further forward than we were in 1993.

For the first time in three elections, it looks like the Tories once more have a chance to make the ‘law and order issue’ their own.

Campbell leads cavalry charge for Blair

Alastair Campbell's appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry this week was simply designed to lay the ground for the main event in a few week's time when Tony Blair himself takes the stand. But the former Prime Minister's plans to mount a robust defence of the Iraq War mean more bad news for his successor. Here's today's Journal column.

---

When I heard on the radio a week or so ago that Alastair Campbell was to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War this week, my first thought was of the Dickensian hero Sydney Carton.

As fans of A Tale of Two Cities will know, it was Carton who, in a supreme act of self-sacrifice at the climax of the novel, uttered the immortal words: “It is a far, far, better thing than I have ever done….”

Would Campbell, a man whose practice of the black arts of spin and smear has done more to degrade British politics in the past 20 years than any other individual, finally be prepared to do a “better thing” than he has ever done in the cause of truth?

Well, in a sense, the answer was yes. Because, although Campbell remains completely unrepentant about the Iraq War, and his role in inveigling the public into supporting it, he has, at least, finally been prepared to be honest about how and why it happened.

Appearing at the inquiry on Tuesday, the former Downing Street director of communications was asked by panel member Sir Roderick Lyne about a series of letters between Tony Blair and President George Bush in the run-up to the conflict.

He replied that the tenor of the letters was: "We are going to be with you in making sure that Saddam Hussein faces up to his obligations and that Iraq is disarmed. If that cannot be done diplomatically and it is to be done militarily, Britain will be there.”

The significance of this revelation is that it provides yet more conclusive evidence that Mr Blair’s determination to remove Saddam over-rode all other political and diplomatic considerations.

As the former Cabinet Secretary Lord Turnbull described it in his own evidence to the inquiry this week, his approach was essentially: “I’m going to do regime change and just talk the disarmament language.”

So what is Mr Campbell up to? Is he somehow intent on further trashing his old boss’s already tarnished historical reputation in the hope of garnering a few cheap headlines?

Not a bit of it. It is, as ever with Campbell, part of a concerted and deliberate strategy by Mr Blair and his inner circle to use the Chilcot inquiry to mount an unapologetic defence of the war.

Mr Campbell has always prided himself on being a loyal party man, but in the context of the forthcoming election, this is, to say the very least, unhelpful stuff for Gordon Brown and Labour.

The prospect of Mr Blair and other senior ex-colleagues loudly defending the war in the run-up to polling day is a nightmare scenario for the Prime Minister - but the truth is there isn’t a damned thing he can do about it.

And it is not just Messrs Blair and Campbell. We learn from a prominent North-East blogger that the Defence Minister, Kevan Jones, is shortly to go into print to explain why he supported the invasion in 2003, and why he still supports it now.

Fair play to Kevan for sticking to his guns, but I respectfully predict it will not win him a single additional vote in Durham North come 6 May - and may well lose him a fair few.

In the months following Mr Blair’s resignation in 2007, Mr Brown had a clear opportunity to distance the government from the Iraq debacle - if not from the actual decision to go to war, at least from the way in which it was done.

Thanks in part to Alastair Campbell, that option now no longer exists.

Blair's candour is six years too late

So Tony Blair has finally confirmed what we have all suspected for years - that he was determined to go to war in Iraq irrespective of whether or not there were any weapons of mass destruction there. Would that he had been so disarmingly honest with MPs and the public back in March 2003. Here's today's Journal column.

---

Over the past week, the world’s politicians have been focused on the future, specifically on how to combat the threat of climate change that promises some very uncertain futures for tens of millions of their people.

As I write, world leaders seem no nearer a deal, although such is the nature of these things that this may well have changed by the time today’s Journal arrives on your doormat.

By all accounts, our own Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been working hard behind the scenes to secure some kind of agreement - in between paying tribute to Sir Terry Wogan, of course.

So often all at sea in the domestic political arena, international politics seem to bring out the best in Mr Brown, as she showed earlier this year in the talks over the global economic recovery plan.

But even if there is a deal or sorts, and the Prime Minister is seen to have played a part in brokering it, the impact of Copenhagen on the political battle back home will be minimal.

So I make no apologies this week for focusing once again on an issue where, far from working to achieve global consensus, a British Prime Minister fairly comprehensively ruptured it.

I refer of course to the Iraq War, and specifically to Tony Blair’s startling admission last weekend that he would have taken us into it come what may.

Asked by interviewer Fern Britton whether he would have still sought to remove Saddam Hussein had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction, he replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him.”

Now the first thing to say about this is that it was actually the wrong question by Britton, a mistake which an experienced political interviewer like Nick Robinson would surely not have made.

Because thanks to Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry, we now know that the government did indeed have cause to realise there were no WMDs before the conflict even began.

Foreign Office official Sir William Erhman told the inquiry last month that, ten days before the invasion, intelligence was received that Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons has been dismantled.

Yet the government decided to conceal this game-changer from MPs and the public in the full knowledge that it would drive an Exocet through its case for war.

Let us for a moment imagine a counterfactual history based on the premise that Mr Blair was indeed “a pretty straight kind of guy” and as such had been more honest with the public about his reasons for going to war.

Let us suppose that he had come to the House of Commons on the day of that dramatic debate in March 2003 and said: “There are no WMDs, but we’re still going in because I promised George Bush that we would a year ago.”

Would he still have been Prime Minister by the end of that evening? Of course not.

We wouldn’t have just have been talking about Robin Cook and Clare Short resigning. Most of the Cabinet, including, I suspect, Mr Brown himself, would have followed them out of the door.

Mr Cook said that night: “Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.”

Well, thanks to Chilcot, we now know there was no “probably” about it.

The idea that Mr Blair could ever have secured a Commons majority for a war based on regime change is utterly fanciful.

And the more of these grubby revelations emerge, the harder it will be for his unfortunate successor to retain his own majority next Spring.

Less popular than Van Rompuy

Most opinion polls tend to tell you what you already know, and to reinforce the "received wisdom" about politics and politicians. But I have to admit to being startled by one of the findings in the PoliticsHome poll on the European presidency released this afternoon.

In my own personal view, the whole appointments procedure has been a complete fiasco and we have ended up, in Herman Van Rompuy and Cathy Ashton, with a pair of complete political pygmies in the EU's two most senior roles.

Yet that is not entirely how the wider public sees it, apparently. While agreeing that the process has been undemocratic, most people are relieved that a low-profile figure such as Van Rompuy has taken the presidential job rather than a "traffic stopper" such as Tony Blair.

According to PH: "61% believe that Van Rompuy is preferable to Tony Blair as president." Isn't that just a spectacular measure of the obloquy into which the three-times election victor has now sunk?

Blair presidency would be gift-horse to the Tories

The tide already seems to be going out on the Blair bid for the European presidency, but were it to happen, it might actually help David Cameron. Here's today's Journal column.

---

There are many reasons why William Hague was not a successful leader of the Conservative Party – the fact that he had the bad luck to come up against Tony Blair at the height of his powers being perhaps the most significant.

But one thing no-one has ever doubted about Mr Hague is his wit, a weapon he has regularly deployed to devastating effect at the expense of his political opponents.

Back in 1998, his savage deconstruction of the government’s “annual report” reduced the Commons to tears of mirth, and accurately predicted New Labour’s journey “from fascination to admiration to disillusion to contempt.”

More recently, he conjured up an equally hilarious image of Gordon Brown’s ultimate nightmare – having to greet Mr Blair’s EU motorcade in Downing Street and being forced through gritted teeth to utter the words: “Welcome, Mr President.”

Cue loud laughter on both sides of the Chamber – except that, on the question of whether Mr Blair should assume the presidency of the European Council, Mr Hague was possibly being a trifle unfair on the Prime Minister.

For in a bizarre piece of role reversal, it is Mr Brown who is supporting the man he schemed and plotted to destroy for ten long years, while Tory leader David Cameron, the self-proclaimed “heir to Blair,” is fighting desperately to block it.

Mr Cameron’s motives are perhaps the easiest to fathom. As he said this week, he doesn’t want an EU president anyway, and he certainly doesn’t want one as powerful and persuasive as the former Prime Minister.

The Tory leader may have copied much of Mr Blair’s style and many of his policies - but that doesn’t necessarily mean he wants to have to deal with the man at the international negotiating tables.

Mr Brown’s attitude, however, is possibly more ambivalent. On the face of it, he is probably telling the truth when he says the government is supporting Mr Blair’s candidature on the grounds that it would be “good for Britain.”

In so doing, he is also hoping to secure the kind of short-term tactical advantage over the Tories that Mr Brown loves to calibrate - by making it appear as if they are acting against the national interest.

But there is also the possibility that Brown backing Blair for EU president is part of some kind of Blairite-Brownite non-aggression pact under which one side dare not move against the other.

If Mr Brown’s people were to be caught briefing against a Blair presidency, Mr Blair’s might just feel tempted to start briefing that it’s time the Labour Party had a new leader.

So should Sedgefield’s one-time MP get the job? Well, the debate in the end really boils down to the question of whether his undoubted leadership qualities trump his flawed record.

Yes, he would give Europe a much stronger voice on the world stage, and, in a world that is too often dominated by the US, Russia and China, that would surely be no bad thing.

But many British voters find themselves unable to overlook the fact that, as Prime Minister, he led the country into a war which most now agree was fought on a false prospectus.

And as the former Foreign Secretary Lord Owen said this week: “Like contempt of court, contempt of parliament should always be a disqualification for holding high office.”

Will he get the job? The signs were looking less than positive yesterday, with European socialist leaders refusing to endorse his candidature and deciding instead to convene a panel to consider names.

Furthermore, the EU has a history of making lowest common denominator appointments to its most senior roles, which is why becoming Prime Minister of Luxembourg is a better career move than it might at first appear.

But either way, if Messrs Cameron and Hague really think that President Blair is somehow going to get us all sold on the idea of European integration, they are surely worrying unnecessarily.

Is a discredited former leader re-emerging in a powerful unelected role really likely to endear the EU to an already sceptical British public? I think not.

The c-word is not enough

Gordon Brown's use of the "c-word" this week was designed to clear the air over spending - but Labour's problems as it approaches the next election go deeper. Here's today's Journal column.

---

Over the course of the last three general elections, British politics has followed a fairly familiar pattern, with the question of who can best be trusted to run our key public services the main point at issue in each contest.

For almost all of that time, a Labour Party which promised more national resources for services such as education and health after 18 years of Tory tax-cutting and spending restraint has had things by and large all its own way.

By contrast, the Tories found themselves on the wrong side of the political tide – instinctive tax-cutters and reluctant spenders who were simply not trusted to carry out the investment in schools and hospitals which, by then, the public wanted to see.

When the history of the Blair-Brown years comes to be written, this underlying political consensus for greater public spending will be seen as the key factor underpinning Labour’s long political hegemony.

Of course, there were other reasons for Labour’s three successive victories. In 1997, the country was so heartily sick of John Major’s sleaze-ridden Tories that Labour would probably have won irrespective of its spending pledges.

The Tories then compounded their problems in both 2001 and 2005 by going into the election with the wrong leaders in William Hague and Michael Howard, when Ken Clarke would have been a much more voter-friendly choice on both occasions.

And of course, throughout this time they were up against an acknowledged master in Tony Blair who, whatever his shortcomings as a national leader, will go down in history as an election-winner par excellence.

But notwithstanding this, the essential dividing line in British politics between 1997 and 2009 remained one of Labour investment versus Tory “cuts” – although in reality that sometimes just meant the Tories were planning to spend slightly less than Labour.

For Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor oversaw the huge public spending programme, the lesson was clear. The way to win elections was to simply to highlight what local services the Tories would “cut” from Labour’s own programmes.

And who knows, it could have worked for him again, could have secured for Labour that elusive fourth term, were it not for the fact that the whole strategy was blown sky-high by the recession.

The extent of the problem really started to become clear in this year’s Budget which revealed the scale of the debt mountain facing the country in the wake of the government’s reflation measures.

Henceforth, there would be no “investment” as we have come to understand the term. There would, and could only be cuts.

This presented Mr Brown with an obvious difficulty. The Prime Minister is not known for his political agility and once he decides on a certain strategy, his usual approach, like Churchill’s, is to “keep buggering on.”

And so he did, through numerous Prime Minister’s Question Times this summer when the “Labour investment versus Tory cuts” mantra was faithfully trotted out to an increasingly weary public.

It was, unsurprisingly, Peter Mandelson who first cottoned-on to the fact that it just wasn’t working any more, and as I wrote a few weeks back, it was Mandy who began to lay the ground for a different approach, in his Newsnight interview last month.

“I fully accept that in the medium term the fiscal adjustment that we are going to have to make….will be substantial. There will be things that have to be postponed and put off, and there will probably be things that we cannot do at all,” he said at the time.

The upshot of all this repositioning was this week’s speech to the TUC Conference by Mr Brown in which he finally conceded, for the first time, that Labour too will oversee spending cuts if, against all odds, the party still manages to win next year.

To give Gordon his due, he didn’t just whisper the dreaded c-word. In fact he used it four times for good measure.

“We will cut costs, cut inefficiencies, cut unnecessary programmes, and cut lower priority budgets,” he told the conference.

Labour’s spinners say the speech was designed to “clear the air and enable Labour’s message to be heard again.” Whether or not it will achieve that end remains very much an open question.

As it is, the dividing lines between the two main parties, at least on the issue of public spending, now seem very blurred.

The argument between Mr Brown and Tory leader David Cameron would appear to revolve around the question of whether the cuts should happen now, as the Tories are advocating , or later, so as not to damage the recovery as Labour is arguing.

But of course, by the time the election actually comes round next spring, this distinction will have all but disappeared, and we will be in a scenario where cutbacks will swiftly follow whoever wins.

Lord Mandelson, with his customary indefatigability, is trying to draw a distinction between a Labour Party that will cut spending reluctantly and a Tory Party that will do it with relish, but it is doubtful how much traction this has with the public.

The real difficulty for Messrs Brown and Mandelson is that the next election is looking increasingly likely to be fought on what is natural Tory territory.

Thanks to the downturn, the consensus in favour of increased investment in public services which has been the foundation of Labour’s success over the past decade has finally started to shift.

What the public now wants and expects is, first and foremost, a government that will get the public finances in some sort of order, even if it means cutting spending programmes.

And if the prevailing public view is that spending has to be reduced, the hard truth for Labour is that the Tories are, by temperament and history, the party best-placed to do it.

Charisma alone is not enough

Can Barack Obama restore the American public's faith in politics? And can David Cameron restore the British public's faith in the Tory Party? Here's today's Journal column.

---

Politicians are ultimately frail vessels for the hopes they are meant to bear. They are only human, yet sometimes we invest them with such superhuman qualities as to practically invite disappointment.

Tony Blair certainly fell into that category. When he took over as Prime Minister in May 1997 after a dismal period of Tory misrule, the sense of a new beginning in the country was almost palpable.

As the man himself memorably said on that bright morning at London’s Royal Festival Hall as Labour activists gathered to celebrate their victory: “A new dawn has broken, has it not?”

Nearly twelve years on, another politician finds himself in a similar position. Barack Obama this week took over from quite possibly the worst president in 200 years of American history, and once again a country is filled with new hope and optimism.

As George W. Bush leaves office after eight tumultuous years, it is interesting to reflect on the part he played in souring the British public’s relationship with Mr Blair.

We will, of course, never know what might have happened had Mr Bush not decided to go to war with Iraq, and Britain not been dragged into the imbroglio, but the suspicion persists that the course of the Blair premiership would have been rather different.

As the late Robin Cook noted in his resignation speech in the Commons in March 2003, had the hanging chads in Florida fallen the other way and Al Gore become president instead, the whole debacle would probably never have happened.

Would Mr Blair still be Prime Minister even now? It will, I suspect, go down as one of the great modern political counterfactuals, alongside "What would have happened if John Smith had lived?"

Our experiences over the past decade have perhaps caused us to distrust “charisma” as a political commodity. Certainly we seem as a nation to be less easily persuaded by Tory leader David Cameron’s easy charm than we were by Mr Blair’s in the mid-1990s.

American voters, though, have always been more star-struck, even though they have suffered far deeper and more bitter disillusionments over the past 40 years than we have on this side of the pond.

Yet despite the national humiliation of the Watergate scandal and the sheer, downright sleaziness of the Monica Lewinsky affair, they have never quite given up on their search for someone capable of stepping into the shoes of their lost leader, John F. Kennedy.

Mr Obama is the kind of politician who has it in him to fill that void in the American psyche, to renew their faith in politics and political leadership, but of course, the corollary of that is he also has it in him to further deepen that disillusionment – as Mr Blair ultimately did in the UK.

President Obama has at least made a positive start. The promised dismantling of Guantanamo Bay has already begun, and moves are already under way to bring an end to the Iraq adventure.

But if anything, the new leader of the western world seems to be intent on playing down those great expectations that surround him.

The inauguration speech did not last an hour and a half. It contained little soaring rhetoric. And there were no compelling soundbites of the magnitude of "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Instead, the watchword was "responsibility" as Mr Obama sought to present himself perhaps less in the mould of JFK and more in the mould of Gordon Brown - less a Hollywood-style superstar and more a “serious man for serious times."

Indeed, Mr Obama’s use of the phrase “a new era of responsibility” on Tuesday carried uncanny echoes of our own Prime Minister’s attacks on “the age of irresponsibility.”

While as a soundbite, this is not quite in the league of “we have nothing to fear but fear itself,” it will probably go down as the defining message of Mr Obama’s inaugural address.

Back home, though, the other big political story of the week was the return of Ken Clarke to the Tory frontbench as Shadow Business Secretary after nearly 12 years in the wilderness.

This too was in part a consequence of the economic downturn, but in the broader political picture, it is a recognition of the fact that the Tories have not been making the best use of their available talents.

Much has already been written about the head-to-head between Mr Clarke and Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, two politicians as different as chalk and cheese.

With Mr Clarke, what you see is by and large what you get, but the former Hartlepool MP has always been a much more elusive figure, ultimately more at home operating in the shadows than in front of the camera.

They do, however, have two very important things in common. They are both very divisive figures within their respective parties, and they are both wildly pro-European.

It will doubtless be a fascinating contest, but I personally think the 68-year-old former Chancellor has sold himself short. He should be back as Shadow Chancellor, flaying Labour for its squandering of the golden economic legacy he left them in 1997.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Mr Clarke’s return is what it says about Mr Cameron.

His undoubted charisma won him the party leadership after he wowed the 2005 conference with his oratory, and it has won him a generally positive public image, but it has not been enough to create that sense of inevitability behind a Tory election victory that Mr Blair enjoyed in the mid-90s.

The return of Mr Clarke has given the Cameron team a much-needed injection of experience and gravitas at a time when it has been struggling to establish itself as a government-in-waiting.

Like Mr Obama, perhaps Mr Cameron too is recognising that charisma alone is not enough.

What is an uber-Blairite?

Sunder Katwala had a go at attempting to give a serious answer to this burning political question today over at Liberal Conspiracy, but with all due respect to Sunder and LibCon, I'm not at all sure it deserves one.

Uber-Blairism, to my mind, is not so much a serious political philosophy, as belief in a sort of political parallel universe in which Tony Blair still retains the support of the overwhelming majority of the public, Gordon Brown and his cohorts are a group of unpersons quietly fulminating on the backbenches, and the Labour Party, far from being a "moral crusade," is no more than a vehicle for the permanent retention of power at whatever cost.

This is the gist of what I wrote in the comments in the LibCon post:

Uber-Blairism is defined by the following core values:

1. That the Labour Party's position on any given issue should be defined in opposition to whatever views its traditional supporters hold on it.

2. That there should be no ideological constraints on the party drifting as far to the right as necessary in order to outflank the Tories.

3. That Gordon Brown is a useless twat who should never have been allowed to become Prime Minister and should now be got rid of at the earliest possible opportunity.

I could, perhaps, have added a 4th, namely: That the only viable British foreign policy is to disappear up the arse of the White House and stay there (a senior Blairite official actually said this once.) Can anyone think of any more?

Miliband must distance himself from Blair

If David Miliband is to become Labour leader, he will have to win it from the centre, not by surrounding himself with Blairite "ultras." Here's my column in today's Newcastle Journal.

***

With the new football season almost upon us, hundreds of thousands of armchair fans will doubtless be spending the next few days selecting their Fantasy League sqauds for 2008/2009.

But as far as political journalists are concerned, there is nothing they enjoy more at this otherwise lean time of the year than a good old game of Fantasy Cabinets.

So it wasn’t entirely surprising this week to find one national newspaper attempting to guess the shape of David Miliband’s government line-up before the poor man has even got as far as the starting-line in a leadership race.

The South Shields MP, we are told, will appoint his fellow North-East Blairite, Darlington’s Alan Milburn, to the job of Chancellor if he succeeds in replacing Gordon Brown.

On the face of it, they might seem like a good combination, a political Sutton and Shearer – or for Newcastle fans with longer memories, a Macdonald and Tudor, perhaps.

Here, after all, are two youngish, thrusting reformers with the energy, charisma and above all fresh ideas to revive Labour’s moribund political fortunes.

But to return to the footballing analogy, in Labour Party terms it is a bit like playing David Beckham and David Bentley – two right-wingers – in the same England XI. It makes the team look unbalanced.

And if the 43-year-old Foreign Secretary is serious about winning the Labour leadership, putting together a balanced ticket is going to be absolutely key to his prospects.

It is not hard to see why this should be the case. Although Mr Miliband has few personal enemies in the Labour Party, he is instinctively distrusted by many as a “Blair Mark 2.”

Although Mr Miliband’s politics are rather more nuanced than this – in some respects he is well to the left of his old boss – there are some who would view his candidacy as a sort of restoration project.

Hence the very last thing he needs is to be seen to be teaming up with Mr Milburn, who apart from his old chum Stephen Byers is about the most dyed-in-the-wool Blairite “ultra” around.

What he needs is to be seen to be reaching out not to his natural allies on the right of the party, but to his potential opponents on the centre-left.

In the light of all this, it is understandable that many observers this week saw the claims about a “Mili-Mil” leadership plot as a piece of black propaganda by the Brownites to discredit the Foreign Secretary.

Indeed, so successful does it appear to have been in this regard that I wonder if the Prime Minister’s old spinmeister Charlie Whelan is back at his side.

The genius of the story – if indeed it did have Mr Brown’s fingerprints on it – was that it played exactly into the party’s fears about what Mr Miliband might do as leader.

No matter that Mr Milburn himself has dismissed the reports, in terms, as “balls” – enough seeds of doubt will have been planted to make people think twice about the whole enterprise.

So let me indulge in a bit of Fantasy Cabinet-making myself on Mr Miliband’s behalf, of the kind that would suggest he is genuinely reaching out to all sides of the party.

The two people who are going to be crucial in any leadership contest – the kingmakers in my view – are the health secretary Alan Johnson in the centre, and the former deputy leadership candidate Jon Cruddas on the left.

I wrote a fortnight ago that Mr Miliband’s old friendship with Mr Johnson dating back to their days as education ministers could be central to his chances, and I stand by that.

Many MPs would like Mr Johnson to stand himself, but failing that, his endorsement will carry huge weight.

As for Mr Cruddas, it was he who swung the deputy leadership for Harriet Harman last year after making clear on the BBC’s Question Time that his second-preference vote would go her way.

But the job he really wants is not the deputy leadership, but that of reforming the party’s internal structures and galvanising its decrepit grassroots organisation.

If Mr Miliband really is in the business of handing out Cabinet jobs in advance, he should promise Mr Johnson the job of Deputy Prime Minister and Mr Cruddas the party chairmanship.

With those two on board, he could make a powerful case that, far from being a divisive “Blairite,” he is really the candidate who can unite this fractious, divided party.

As for Mr Milburn, while there should clearly be a place for him in any post-Brown administration, I doubt if that place is the Treasury.

Although the Darlington MP was briefly Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1998-99,
his real political talents lie in blue-sky thinking and communicating a vision, rather than figures and grasp of detail.

Indeed he has the kind of skillset that is required more for No 10 than for No 11, which is one of the reasons I have previously advocated him as a leadership contender.

I can see him being offered a Cabinet Office cross-cutting role to "think the unthinkable," possibly looking at policies across the piece to kick-start social mobility, his pet subject.

In the final analysis, Mr Miliband needs to keep his eyes not just on the internal party selectorate but on the broader electoral picture.

If the idea of a “Blair Mark 2” is unpopular within the Labour Party, it is not likely to prove any less so amongst the public as a whole.

The main reason Mr Brown has proved an unpopular Prime Minister is because he was unable to be the change the country wanted after his predecessor’s long reign.

Mr Miliband must base his appeal not just on the fact that he isn’t Gordon Brown. He must make clear that he isn’t Tony Blair either.

Blair debate takes to airwaves

A couple of weeks back, Political Betting's Mike Smithson and I had an entertaining online debate over the question of whether Labour would now be doing even worse in the polls had Tony Blair remained as leader. Later today Mike and I will be taking to the airwaves with our respective views with a live debate on BBC Radio Five Live. It will be on air at about 6.35pm this evening, so do tune in!

Linford v Smithson on Brown v Blair

Mike Smithson is one of the genuine giants of political blogging so I'm always rather flattered when he namechecks this blog. Today he devoted an entire post to a discussion I raised on his blog last week over whether Labour would be in quite the mess it's in now had Tony Blair stayed as leader.

My view on this has always been that Blair had become a liability for Labour long before 2005 and that had Brown been leader at the last GE the party would actually have won a majority in excess of 100, but Mike disagrees and thinks that if Blair were still leader the Tories' lead now would still be only in single figures.

Most of the posters on PB.com sided with Mike on this but there was some support for my point of view from the distinguished pollster Robert Waller who made the following very interesting comment:

"By 2005 Blair was a very significant disadvantage to Labour, with Professor Harold Clarke and other academics using the British Election Study claiming that there would have been another 100 plus landslide majority if he had not been PM at the last general election.

"Thereafter, he did have to go, forced out earlier than he intended by pressure within various sections of the party culminating in the ‘plots’ around the time of the Lebanese invasion/crisis.

"With his party as well as the public thoroughly fed up with him, there was no possibility of remaining; the massive sigh of relief was the cause of the ‘Brown bounce’ (that really wasn’t Brown’s attractions!) in the third quarter of 2007. If for some reason Blair had managed to avoid all the pressure to go in mid 2007, the head of steam of ‘time for a change’ would just have got stronger and stronger.

"In addition he would have faced almost all the significant problems Brown does, unless he would be able to work a miracle with the oil and other commodity prices and economic peessimism which are the reasons for Labour’s current dire position in the polls. They would surely have been even worse off under Blair."

Ultimately, of course, as one other poster pointed out, all such counterfactuals are meaningless. But they are good fun, nevertheless.

Gordon's paper anniversary

In today's column in the Newcastle Journal, I concede that I got it wrong about Gordon Brown. Well, sort of. You'll have to read to the end to find out what I mean!

***

This Friday, June 27, Gordon Brown will mark what, in usual circumstances, would be a significant political milestone – the first anniversary of his succession to the premiership.

When 12 months ago the newly-elected Prime Minister addressed the nation outside No 10 Downing Street, little could he have imagined how quickly his fortunes would turn around.

He spoke then of his old school motto: “I will try my utmost.” Later, in his first Labour Party conference speech as premier, he promised: “I will not let you down.”

But sadly, that is exactly what he has done. Indeed for many people, to describe the Brown premiership as a let-down would be the understatement of the century.

Over the years leading up to Mr Brown’s accession to the top job, there was a widespread view among centre-left commentators that he would be an improvement on what had gone before.

Since I was one of those who shared that analysis, this column amounts to something of a mea culpa.

We thought that Mr Brown would cast off his customary dourness once he got to No 10. We thought he would put an end to spin. We thought he would lead the Labour Party in a fresh and radical new direction.

And on all of those scores, the truth of the matter is that we got him wrong.

Part of my optimism about Mr Brown as a putative Prime Minister was based on my knowledge of him as a private man, and the hope and expectation that his personal qualities would shine through once he assumed the top job.

In all my admittedly limited dealings with them, I found he and Tony Blair to be an almost exact reversal of their public personas.

On the three occasions I interviewed Mr Blair for this newspaper, I found him shy, ill-at-ease and totally unable to make even the most rudimentary small-talk.

Mr Brown, by contrast, I found charming, witty, eager to engage in conversation - in short, nothing like the grim Stalinist control-freak he is now widely perceived as.

There were other grounds for optimism. Mr Brown had always portrayed himself as the serious one in the Blair-Brown partnership, and after a decade of showmanship from Mr Blair, the public seemed ready for that.

Allied to this was a feeling that the new man would eschew then reliance on spin that tarnished the Blair era - “not Flash, just Gordon” as the slogan put it.

It could have been a winner, but as the commentator Jonathan Freedland pointed out this week, Brown himself put paid to it by his behaviour over the election-that-never-was last autumn.

“The effect was to show that Brown was as much a calculating schemer as anyone else in the trade – he just wasn’t very skilful or subtle at it. Not flash, just a politician,” he wrote.

But above all, our optimism about Gordon Brown was based on his long record of championing the social justice agenda within a government that often seemed careless of traditional Labour values.

He, after all, was the Chancellor who quietly redistributed billions of pounds to the worst-off in society via his system of tax credits.

He was the man whose successive comprehensive spending reviews pumped billions more into the vital public services on which the worst-off in society most depended.

And he was the man who, each September, would stand up and reassure the party faithful that real Labour “var-lews” as he called them had not been forgotten despite all appearances to the contrary.

Was he just playing to the left-wing gallery all that time? Well, it would seem so.

When Mr Brown took over, the expectation was that he would “hit the ground running” with a blitz of an announcements designed to signal a clean break with the Blair era.

In his statement outside No 10, he appeared to encourage that view, declaring that this would be a “new government with new priorities” and concluding with the words: “Now let the work of change begin.”

But to paraphrase an old political joke, while he may have been elected as New Brown, but he has governed very much as Old Blair.

So there has been no attempt, for instance, to tackle the widening inequalities in our society, or address the decline in social mobility that occurred throughout the Thatcher-Major-Blair years.

And far from drawing a line under Mr Blair’s foreign policy disasters, if anything last week’s press conference with President Bush showed him in full Blair mode.

Our expectations of Mr Brown weren’t purely based on wishful thinking. Radical plans for his premiership were indeed drawn up before he took over, some of which were briefed in advance to journalists.

But when it came to the crunch, Mr Brown bottled it, just as he bottled out of the election and just as he has now bottled out of taking on David Davis over 42-day detention – a decision he may well come to regret.

The real tragedy, though, is that we didn’t really get Mr Brown wrong at all. He is indeed all those things we always thought he was.

He is a decent, serious man with a passion for social justice and an overriding concern for the underdog. What he lacked was simply the political courage to be himself once he got to No 10.

That fatal loss of nerve is the single biggest reason why Gordon won’t be hanging out the bunting as he marks his first anniversary this Friday, and why his primary emotion will be one of relief at having lasted even a year.

I for one would currently lay reasonably long odds against him making it to two

Blair says Brown not to blame

Oh well, that's big of him. Will he now admit that, actually, he is to blame for Labour's current plight by staying at least four years beyond his sell-by date and denying Gordon the chance to win his own mandate in 2005? Don't hold your breath....

The Not the Labour Party

This week's Saturday column in the Newcastle Journal focuses on the Conservatives and specifically on whether David Cameron needs to do more to set out a distinctive vision for the country.

***

Of all the many political truisms that get trotted out from time to time, one of the most oft-heard but possibly most misleading is the one that says oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them.

It is true there has been the odd election where that has been the case, but by and large, it is bunkum.

In the last election, in 2005, for instance, an unpopular and discredited Labour government was grudgingly returned to office not on its own merits but for fear of what a Michael Howard-led administration might do.

Another election that was “lost” by the opposition as opposed to “won” by the government was Labour’s “suicide note” election under the leadership of Michael Foot in 1983. The contests in 1987, 1992 and 2001 fall into a similar category.

The 1997 election was a bit of a special case. Perhaps uniquely in the past 40 years, this was an election which the opposition did as much to win as the government did to lose.

John Major’s government may have been universally derided – but Tony Blair never took victory for granted, and his mantra of “no complacency” continued long after it became obvious to everyone else that he was heading for a landslide.

Practically the only election in modern times where the old cliché about governments and oppositions did hold true was 1979, when Margaret Thatcher’s Tories defeated Jim Callaghan’s Labour.

This was not so much a triumph for “Thatcherism” which was only a half-formulated ideology at that point, as a defeat for Old Labourism in the wake of the chaos of the Winter of Discontent.

So what’s all this got to do with the present day? Well, it is clear that the next general election, if it were held tomorrow, would be another which fell into the 1979 category.

We have in this country at the present time a government that seems to have decisively lost the public’s confidence, yet an opposition that has not yet done enough to earn it.

In 1979, people voted for Mrs Thatcher despite having little idea what her government would look like – it is possible that had they known it would mean 3m unemployed, she would not have won.

Likewise today, David Cameron appears to be on course for an election win even though very few people have any clear idea what sort of Prime Minister he will turn out to be.

Mr Cameron’s true appeal would currently appear to rest on the fact that he represents the Not Labour Party, and that he is Not Gordon Brown.

The collapse of public confidence in the government has yet to be matched by any great outpouring of public enthusiasm for the Tories – hardly surprising given that Mr Cameron has turned the party into a policy-free-zone.

What we do know is fairly unconvincing. For instance, we know Mr Cameron would stick to Labour spending plans for much of his first term, while somehow delivering a large cut in inheritance tax for the richest 6pc of voters.

Meanwhile he has yet to discover a compelling “Big Idea,” while a lot of what he says is merely vacuous mood-music such as “let sunshine win the day.”

There are basically two schools of thought within the Conservative Party as to how they should respond to the current crisis facing the Brown administration.

Essentially, the debate is over whether they should follow the sort of strategy successfully employed by Mrs Thatcher in 1979, or the one equally successfully employed by Mr Blair in 1997.

Some argue that the party now needs to do very little in the way of setting out a new policy agenda, and simply sit back and let the government continue to destroy itself.

Others, however, maintain that this is not enough, and that the party still needs to articulate a clear vision of what it will do with power, as Mr Blair did to great effect between 1994-97.

This is in essence a refinement of the continuing debate within the Conservative Party over how far it needs to change in order to be entrusted again with the nation’s destiny.

By and large, those who fall into the “modernising” camp are arguing that the party still needs to do more to “decontaminate” the Tory brand.

But the seeming inevitability of a Tory victory has latterly encouraged the “traditionalists” who want Mr Cameron to stop the political cross-dressing and place more emphasis on cutting taxes and cutting crime.

At the moment, this camp seems to have the upper hand – there has been markedly less talk from Mr Cameron in recent weeks about the importance of winning from the “centre ground.”

But whichever side prevails in this argument will ultimately depend on what happens to the government.

There is still time for Mr Brown to recover, although that really depends on an improvement in the economy that is looking less and likely with each new doom-laden forecast.

The only other alternative for him is the so-called “go for broke” strategy which involves him throwing caution to the winds, doing something radical, and somehow discovering a convincing narrative.

There is also, of course, time for Labour to change its leader again, although many Labour MPs fear that would now do no more than avert a landslide.

Logically speaking, a situation in which a government has lost the public’s support but an opposition has not yet earned it should have “hung Parliament” written all over it.

Oddly enough, that is what Jim Callaghan’s pollsters told him was the best he could hope for if he were to go to the country in the autumn of 1978, as everyone expected him to.

As I have pointed out before, had Mr Callaghan known that his delay would lead not to outright Labour victory but to 18 years of Tory rule, he would have taken that hung Parliament.

Three decades on, I suspect that the current generation of Labour MPs would take it, too.

Europe debate not played out yet

In my Preview of 2008 at the end of December, the three things I confidently predicted would not happen this year were that there would not be a general election, that the Lib Dems would not changed their leader again, and that there would not be a referendum on the EU Treaty.

And indeed there will not be. Even if the Lib Dems had joined the Tories in the voting lobbies on Wednesday night, it still would not have been enough to force the government to hold a national vote on the issue without a much larger Labour rebellion.

But while that particular issue now seems to be done and dusted, there are other circumstances which could see the question of Britain's relationship with Europe back in the domestic political spotlight - as I argue in today's Journal column.

The first is if Tony Blair takes the EU presidency and every subsequent clash between Britain and Brussels becomes viewed through the prism of the Blair-Brown feud. It would be pure political soap opera, and the press would have an absolute field day with it.

More seriously, though, if concern about economic migration to Britain from within the EU continues to rise, it could conceivably create the conditions where withdrawal from the Union once again becomes a politically viable option.

My own view on this - though it goes against the grain of my views on both Europe and immigration generally - is that the conflict between continued unlimited immigration from Eastern Europe and our finite spatial resources will not easily be reconciled.

But where the fuggin' hell was Gordon?

So The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles, Tony Blair, Robin Cook, Lady Sarah MacCorquodale, Sir Robert Fellowes, Paul Burrell, Sir Paul Condon, Sir John Stevens, Lord Mishcon, Rosa Monckton, Henri Paul, Trevor Rees and the two doctors at the Paris hospital who treated her were all involved in either the plot to kill Princess Diana or the subsequent cover-up.

Or so says Mohammed al-Fayed, who - let's try and be charitable - is clearly a man who is still in a deep state of grieving for his dead son.

But what struck me as interesting about al Fugger's long list of suspects is that he didn't include Gordon Brown among them.

Could it be that this is another one of Blair's many crimes that El Gordo successfully managed to extricate himself from? And more to the point, why isn't the entire Tory blogosphere demanding to know why the man they call "Macavity" wasn't there?

Stop Bliar

Yes, we thought we were done with him but now it seems the Great Charlatan is threatening to step right back into all our lives again. Sign the petition.

Hat-tip: Bloggerheads.

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.

A study in contradictions

Should we be even mildly surprised that the man who singlehandedly pushed through a piece of legislation earlier this year which forced the closure of several Catholic adoption agencies is now promising to follow all of the teachings of that church?

Well, we are talking here about the instinctive conservative who became leader of the Labour Party; the one-time CND supporter who went to war more times than Churchill; the "pretty staight kind of guy" who presided over the sleaziest government in modern times; the man who "didn't do God" but claimed he would "answer to his maker" for his most controversial decisions; the invader of Iraq who became an ambassador for peace in the Middle East; and the man who promised a "stable and orderly transition" and then spent the first half of this year trying to persuade David Miliband to stand against Gordon.

So no, I think the honest answer is that nothing that Tony Blair says or does should surprise any of us in the least any more.

Like Archbishop Rowan, I wish him well on his Christian pilgrimage. But if there is one thing on which myself and most of those who commented on this recent post would agree, it is that he is not a particularly great recruiting sergeant for those advocating the importance of faith in political life.

The importance of faith

By way of reply to Ourman, Davide Simonetti and others who have questioned my previous post about Nick Clegg, and an earlier one about whether Tony Blair should have discussed his faith, the first thing I want to say is no, I don't believe non-Christians are lesser people, no, I don't believe Christians have a monopoly on morality, and yes, I do agree with Archbishop Rowan that, while I would prefer it if Clegg was a Christian, it is his integrity that matters most.

But I do nevertheless believe that having a personal faith does on the whole make you a better politician, although as I will also make clear, there are always exceptions. So why do I believe this?

There are two main reasons. Firstly, I believe that faith can and usually does give politicians a stronger ethical framework for their actions. I am not saying here that atheists will invariably lack a moral compass, just that having an outside point of reference for one's political beliefs and decisions is helpful.

Canon David Sharp puts it thus: "The Protestant tradition particularly requires a careful examination of the conscience; what will be popular with the public or the party comes far lower down. [His] belief creates another criterion to be passed before he can act. Surely such extra moral tests, over and above strictly political considerations, are likely to make for more responsible decisions."

Secondly, and more fundamentally, I think that because faith in a higher being gives people an awareness of their own limitations and imperfections (the Biblical word "sin" is probably not helpful here) it generally tends to incline them towards humility, and this for me is an essential personal quality for anyone seeking to exercise power over people's lives.

This was why I found Tony Blair's particular brand of Christianity so perplexing. I don't doubt he is a Christian, as indeed is Margaret Thatcher, but his apparent Messiah complex and belief that he could singlehandedly save first the Labour Party, then Britain, then the World, often struck me as evidence of a rather anti-Christian state of mind.

Gordon Brown is a much more genuinely humble man in this regard. His Christianity is much more about applying Jesus's ethical teachings to present-day social problems than rescuing the planet from an axis of evil, and in this sense he seems to me to be a much better example of a Christian politician.

I realise that in the current climate, citing Gordon as a good example of anything is unlikely to convince many to change their point of view, but it is nevertheless as sincere an explanation as I can give of why I believe faith to be important in a political context.