Brown's Kitchen Cabinet

Credit crunch Britain

Throwaway line spotted in Manchester Evening News report on Ronaldo's car smash earlier today:

It has been estimated Ronaldo has spent around £2m on cars since joining United five years ago.

Sadly, such largesse was not quite enough to save the 1,200 workers at Nissan who have lost their jobs today.

Brown spooked by curse of Clough

Nine times out of ten whenever a Prime Minister pays a flying visit to a provincial city to talk about safeguarding thousands of jobs he would expect to make the front page of its local evening newspaper. Unfortunately for Gordon Brown, his arrival in Derby today coincided with the news that Nigel Clough is to follow in Old Big 'Ead's illustrious footsteps as boss of the Rams. No real contest for the Derby Evening Telegraph's splash in this footie-mad city.

It would never have happened back in the days of Alastair Campbell's famous "Grid" of course. He'd doubtless have been on the phone to the club telling them to delay their announcement of a new manager for 24 hours.

Clegg in the spotlight

In my Preview of the Year at the previous post I briefly alluded to the fact that Nick Clegg is likely to become the most sought-after man in politics in 2009 as thr two main parties seek to insure themselves against the possibility of a hung Parliament at the next general election.

But Peter Oborne in today's Daily Mail goes much further. He says Brown won't wait until after the election to put together a Lib-Lab coalition, but will actually try to stitch one together this year, with Vince Cable as Chancellor, Lord Pantsdown as Defence Sec and Sir Menzies Campbell eased into the Speakership.

I can't really see the political advantage for Mr Clegg in being seen to prop up what many floating voters still view as a failed and discredited regime despite Mr Brown's recent recovery in the polls, but the prospect of ministerial jags and bums on seats round the Cabinet table no doubt does strange things to some people.

One person who might have a wry smile on his face though is Tony Blair. He planned from the start to bring Lib Dems into the government as part of his grand project to reunite the liberal-left and keep the Tories out of power for 100 years, but was prevented from doing so by an unholy of alliance of Jack Straw, John Prescott and, you've guessed it, Gordon Brown.

Will Gordon survive 2009?

Could Gordon Brown yet stand down before the next election? It's possible. Here's my "Preview of the Year" column from today's Journal.

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Chelsea will regain the Premiership title, the Man Booker Prize will be won by a book about India, Kate Winslet will win an Oscar, King Kev will not return to St James’ Park, and it will snow in April.

Next to UK politics, sport, award ceremonies and the British weather are relatively easy things to predict these days.

But what will the next 12 months hold for Messrs Brown, Cameron, Clegg and Co after a year in which expecting the unexpected became the only real political certainty?

Will 2009 be equally unpredictable – or will we see politics start to return to something approaching “normality?” Well, here are four consequential predictions for how I think the political year could pan out.

Firstly, the recession will deepen in the first half of the year, with soaring levels of unemployment, house repossessions and the number of firms going bust.

Secondly, the political standing of Gordon Brown and Labour, having recovered over the course of 2008, will again start to deteriorate.

Thirdly, the soul-searching will begin again as to whether Mr Brown should lead Labour into the next General Election and whether it would not be better if he stood down with dignity before then.

Fourthly, the outcome of this renewed bout of internal Labour navel-gazing will depend utterly on whether there is any evidence of recovery by the end of the year which could give the party a fighting chance in a 2010 election.

Of these four assertions, the most contentious is probably the second one.

That the recession is going to get worse is something which almost all economists agree upon. However not all political commentators agree that this will necessarily lead to a deterioration in the government’s political position

To suggest that it will do represents a departure from the 2008 “media narrative” of Gordon Brown as the “comeback kid,” defying the normal laws of political gravity by appearing to thrive on economic bad news.

But a new year often heralds a reappraisal, and to my mind, the sheer glut of economic bad news on the way suggests it will be hard for Labour’s recovery to be maintained.

No doubt some readers will already be wondering why I think the economy will cause the political tide to turn against Mr Brown in 2009 when it manifestly failed to do so in 2008.

Well, I think what it boils down to is the impact of what some have termed “the real economy” on voting intentions.

The 2008 crisis was effectively about banks refusing to lend to eachother and credit drying up, and Mr Brown was generally applauded for the way in which he tried to tackle this.

This year, though, the outworkings of the downturn will be much more immediately and keenly felt in peoples’ lives, and the level of anger directed at the government will increase as a result.

There is also the point that support for Mr Brown to tackle the economic crisis may still not translate into real votes for Labour when it comes to placing crosses on ballot papers.

As I wrote last year, the prevailing public mood towards him may very well be a case of: “We want you to stay to sort out this mess – and then we want you to go.”

It follows from my predictions that I don’t think Mr Brown is going to give the voters the chance to kick him out any time in 2009.

Indeed, if Mr Brown had been considering a 2009 election as an option, I think the decision will be very soon taken out of his hands by the wave of redundancies and bankruptcies in the offing.

There are, at least, some European elections coming up in June, and these are likely to be dire for the Prime Minister.

A combination of protest voting over the economy coupled with residual anger among some voters over the refusal to allow a referendum on the European constitution could prove a lethal cocktail for Labour.

It will add fuel to the new media narrative that Mr Brown and Labour are on the way down again and that the “Second Brown Bounce” has finally come to an end.

It is likely to herald a second successive summer of Labour leadership plotting, although whether South Shields MP David Miliband will dip his toes into the water again after last year’s abortive coup remains to be seen.

To retain the confidence of his party Mr Brown will need some economic good news as he goes into the autumn conference season – some demonstrable sign that he has started to turn things around again.

But what if the light at the end of the tunnel fails to appear? What if by that stage it has become clear that Labour is heading for a defeat as cataclysmic as 1997 was for the Tories?

Well, I have felt in my bones for some time that if Mr Brown reaches the point where he concludes Labour cannot win with him as leader, he will stand aside.

Everything in his character points to it – most notably his intense risk-aversion in relation to his own career coupled with his intense loyalty to the party.

The other two main party leaders seem safe for the time being. David Cameron may have failed to establish himself as a Prime Minister in waiting, but the polls are still running in his favour and his party will give him at least one shot at glory.

And Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg will become an increasingly significant figure as the two big parties court his support in the event of a hung Parliament.

But as for Mr Brown….I think it is at least possible that by this time next year he will have announced he is not contesting the election, and that Labour will fight under a new leader to be elected early in 2010.

As ever, it will all come down to “the economy, stupid.”

Review of the Year 2008

It's that time of the year again. Here's my look back at an extraordinary political year from today's Newcastle Journal.

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The year 2008 will be remembered as the year that defied the normal laws of political gravity. While the British economy came crashing down, the reputation of Gordon Brown’s government somehow went up and up.

This time last year, the Prime Minister looked down and almost out, likely to go down in history as the short-lived leader of a fag-end administration that looked long past its sell-by date.

It was to get worse before it got better. A succession of dire by-election performances coupled with the loss of the London Mayoralty to Boris Johnson and the Scottish Parliament to the SNP led to a summer of plotting and serious talk of a leadership coup.

But then, in one of the most bizarre and unexpected twists of political fate in recent times, the credit crunch and the accompanying economic downturn rode to Mr Brown’s rescue, enabling him to play to his strengths as a “serious man for serious times.”

Actually, when the Prime Minister used those words, he was talking about someone else – his old friend Peter Mandelson. But more of him later.

At the start of the year, though, Mr Brown seemed less of a serious man for serious times than a political figure of fun, ruthlessly characterised by the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable as having undergone a transformation “from Stalin to Mr Bean.”

He had still, at that stage, not recovered from the debacle of the election-that-never-was in the autumn of 2007 and the succession of rows over Labour funding that followed.

One of those rows claimed a ministerial scalp early in the new year in the shape of Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain, though he was later cleared of any wrongdoing over the matter of his deputy leadership election expenses claims.

The first half of the year was dominated by the run-up to the May elections – notably Ken Livingstone’s battle for a third term as Mayor of London against Mr Johnson’s challenge.

But any hopes Mr Brown might have had of using those elections as a springboard from which to relaunch his flagging premiership were sunk by a chicken coming home to roost in the form of the abolition of the 10p tax rate.

When he had announced this in his final Budget as Chancellor the year before, there had been scarcely a murmur of opposition from either the Labour or Conservative benches.

Not so this year. When Labour MPs realised that the tax change would hit their own people the hardest, it sparked a backbench revolt that forced Mr Brown into a humiliating climbdown.

But the inevitable loss of London, Scotland and hundreds of council seats nationwide was not the worst of it. Far more damaging was the disastrous sequence of by-election losses that saw some of Labour’s safest majorities overturned.

It had begun in Crewe and Nantwich where Tamsin Dunwoody’s attempt to inherit her late mother Gywneth’s Commons seat drowned under a tidal wave of anger over the 10p tax rate.

It continued in Mr Johnson’s old seat of Henley as Labour lost its deposit and slumped to fifth place behind the British National Party and the Greens.

And it finally culminated in Glasgow East, with Labour’s hitherto third-safest seat in Scotland disappearing to the Scottish National Party on a 22pc swing.

Many concluded that Mr Brown’s authority and standing with the public was now so badly shredded as to be beyond recovery. Talk of a leadership challenge began to grow.

Foreign Secretary and South Shields MP David Miliband had long been regarded as the great hope of the party’s Blairite wing. Now he made his first, tentative moves.

In a national newspaper article which caused shockwaves throughout Westminster, he set out a possible prospectus for a Labour fourth term with not a single mention of Mr Brown.

Shortly afterwards MPs went off on their holidays. Mobile phones buzzed between Italian villas as, somehow, the Labour Party tried to come to a collective judgement about what to do with its beleaguered PM.

But there was no September coup. In its wisdom, the party decided it would give Mr Brown one last chance to turn things around at Labour’s autumn conference.

It was too much for four junior members of the government - Siobhan McDonough, Joan Ryan, Barry Gardiner and David Cairns – who all resigned in frustration at the cabinet’s refusal to move against the Prime Minister.

It could hardly have been a worse preparation for the conference, but Mr Brown rose to the challenge and made what by common consensus was the “speech of his life.”

Its key soundbite - “This is no time for a novice” – neatly skewered both Tory leader David Cameron and the banana-wielding young pretender, Mr Miliband.

Then came the reshuffle, with Mr Brown cutting the ground from under the Blairite plotters by bringing back the Blairiest Blairite of them all – former Hartlepool MP Mr Mandelson.

The return of the newly-ennobled Lord Mandelson had a profound impact on the government, and he is now de facto deputy Prime Minister in addition to his official role as Business Secretary.
Finally, there was Mr Brown’s audacious £500bn banking rescue which meant that ten major banks, including the already-nationalised Northern Rock, are now at least partly in public hands.

Coupled with a Pre-Budget Report that saw the government effectively decide to spend its way out of the recession, it was no less than an attempt to turn the Thatcherite politics of the last 30 years on its head.

Labour’s recovery was confirmed by a triumphant by-election campaign in Glenrothes, finally ending the dismal sequence of defeats that had brought Mr Brown to the edge of the abyss.

The party still trails the Tories in the polls, but the 5-6pc deficit is now of the order of those from which mid-term governments often recover to win the next general election.

Whether or not Mr Brown can pull off that feat remains very much open to doubt, given that the economy is still likely to get much worse before it starts to get better.

But in the crucible of this crisis he has, at the very least, discovered a purpose for his premiership: nothing less than the saving of the British economy.