So who did Blair call a c**t?

When it comes to the inner workings of New Labour, Andrew Rawnsley gets all the best scoops. He knows who it was who called Gordon Brown "psychologically flawed," and now he's discovered, via an early draft of Alastair Campbell's memoirs, that Tony Blair once referred to a "very senior" Labour figure from the 1980s as "a cunt."

As recounted in yesterday's Observer, Blair requested that the expletive be deleted from the final version, lest it damage his reputation too much, though as Rawnsley points out, it is hard to see how Blair is going to come out of any book written by Campbell as anything other than media-obsessed.

But be that as it may, Rawnsley's revelations have now kicked off a new guessing game: who was on the end of the Prime Minister's four-letter outburst? Apparently it was "a very senior Labour figure from the 1980s who has been highly critical of New Labour," which narrows the field considerably.

Who were the senior figures from the 1980s? You could name, in moreorless chronological order, Michael Foot, Denis Healey, Peter Shore, Neil Kinnock, Roy Hattersley, John Smith, and Gerald Kaufman. These were the men who, at one time or another, occupied the posts of leader, deputy leader, shadow chancellor or shadow foreign secretary during the course of that decade.

So which one is it? Well, Foot, Kinnock, Smith and Kaufman can be ruled out because none of them has ever been "highly critical" of New Labour. Shore can be ruled out because, although twice a leadership candidate, he never really qualified as "very senior."

It follows, therefore, that Blair must have been referring either to Healey, who has been fairly personally critical of him though not of the wider New Labour project, or Hattersley, who has indeed been highly critical of both. My money is on the latter.

As it is, Hattersley is well-used to being on the end of somewhat agricultural language from his senior party colleagues. During the 1976 leadership election, he dropped in on Tony Crosland and asked him whether he would like to hear in detail his reasons for voting for rival candidate Jim Callaghan.

Whereupon Crosland gave the immortal reply: "No. Fuck off."

The deputy race: what it all means

My latest weekend column focuses on the deputy leadership race and what each of the potential outcomes could signify in terms of the Labour Party's future direction. I argue that while an Alan Johnson win might appear on the surface to be the most electorally advantageous course for the party, a Jon Cruddas victory would open up the prospect of the genuine policy renewal that is vital if New Labour is to re-enthuse the electorate.

Here's an extract:

"So what does it all mean....Well, a Hazel Blears victory would signify that party members, far from wanting a shift away from New Labour, are anxious for Mr Brown not to stray too far from the Blairite faith. On the contrary, a victory for either Mr Cruddas or Mr Hain would indicate a desire for a much more traditional sort of Labour agenda, with concerns about inequality much more to the fore.

If either Mr Benn or Ms Harman wins, it would suggest to me a desire not to rock the boat too much - both stand in the broad mainstream of Labour opinion and both would make natural deputies. Finally a win for Mr Johnson - probably the candidate with the widest public appeal - would suggest that the party is concerned, above all else, about winning the next general election.

Of all the possible outcomes, the one which contains potentially the greatest peril for Mr Brown is a triumph for the backbench outsider, Mr Cruddas. It would be portrayed by the Tories not only as a lurch to the left, but proof that the unions - where the Dagenham MP's support is strongest - still run the Labour Party.

But at the same time, such an outcome would probably provide the greatest opportunity for genuine policy renewal for a party which looks to have run out of ideas. In purely policy terms, if anyone has been setting the agenda in the course of the campaign thus far, it is Mr Cruddas.

Take housing, for instance. For years, this has been a Cinderella issue, neglected by Blair as an issue only of interest to the have-nots whose support he consistently took for granted. New Labour thought that by building thousands of new low-cost homes on brownfield sites, it would widen access to home ownership - but many of these have been snapped up by buy-to-let speculators.

Thanks to Mr Cruddas, the pressing need for a major increase in social housing provision has now leaped to near the top of the agenda for the incoming Brown administration. And whoever emerges as deputy, it is "forgotten" issues such as these which Labour needs to embrace if it is to convince the electorate that it has a fresh and distinctive vision."

Commonsense prevails in Cardiff

It's a long while since I covered Welsh politics in any detail - I was political editor of the South Wales Echo in the mid-90s - but I remember enough about it to know that the "rainbow coalition" idea between Plaid Cymru, the Lib Dems and the Tories was a complete and utter nonsense.

As Rhodri Morgan, now rightfully reinstalled as First Minister points out, there is a natural centre-left or "progressive" majority in Wales and any coalition which failed to reflect that would not have had the support of the Welsh people.

I suppose one can't really blame Plaid leader Ieuan Wyn Jones or Tory leader Nick Bourne for clutching at straws in the way they did, but I thought better of the Lib Dem leader Mike German. In the end he was unable to carry even his own party with him on the rainbow coalition proposal. He should quit.

My Top 10 New Labour Cock-Ups

The knives are out today for Ruth Kelly following the HIPs debacle which is being understandably seen as another example in the long list of New Labour ballsups. Mike Smithson is tipping both Kelly and Patsy Hewitt for the chop in El Gordo's first reshuffle, while Iain Dale has been inspired to launch a poll to find New Labour's most incompetent minister. Only Guido Fawkes of the uber-bloggers has a good word to say about the Blessed Ruth, pointing out (rightly in my view) that Housing Minister Yvette Cooper was much more personally associated with the wretched sellers' packs.

But where, if at all, does it figure in the list of all-time New Labour cock-ups? Well, let's face it, no-one died. Here, for what it's worth is, my Top 10, and with reference to Iain's poll, it follows from this that, without question, the most incompetent New Labour minister is Tony Blair, with Stephen Byers a clear second.

1. Iraq. Hundreds of British soldiers killed in conflict over non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Total absense of pre-planning for aftermath leads to state of civil war. Trust in political process totally collapses after truth about WMD and dodgy intelligence finally emerges. Minister primarily responsible: Tony Blair.

2. Foot and mouth. Millions of healthy animals needlessly slaughtered after Government fails to send in Army soon enough for fear of panicking the country ahead of 2001 general election. Minister responsible: Nick Brown took the rap, but this was Blair's call too.

3 Pension fund raid. PM-elect Brown has valiantly defended this move as a means of targeting resources where they were needed most, but some other way should have been found to do this without entirely wrecking the country's private pensions industry. Minister responsible: Gordon Brown.

4. Jo Moore burying bad news. Besides the death of Dr Kelly (which is covered by the generic cock-up heading of Iraq) this did more than anything else to destroy public trust in New Labour. Minister responsible: Stephen Byers for employing Moore, Blair for initially refusing to allow Byers to sack her.

5. Deportation of foreign prisoners. Proof that the Home Office was indeed "not fit for purpose," it was amazing that such a media-obsessed government didn't spot this disaster waiting to happen. Minister responsible: Charles Clarke, with input from Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

6. Railtrack. The creation of Failtrack will go down as possibly the greatest cock-up of the Major Government. Stephen Byers attempted to put things right, but went about it in totally the wrong way and then tried to evade the truth about it when challenged. Minister responsible: Byers.

7. Health overspends. A government that comes into office pledging to "save the NHS" and pumps more than £20bn of additional spending into the service ends up closing hospitals. Minister responsible: Pat Hewitt has got the blame, but most say the rot set in under John Reid.

8. Millennium Dome. I have been criticised for including this folly in a previous list of New Labour policy failures but seriously, this should have been a celebration of British endeavour on a par with the Festival of Britain or the Great Exhibition. Minister responsible: Peter Mandelson, abetted by Blair.

9. North East regional assembly referendum. You could list any number of devolution-related cock-ups from opposing Ken Livingstone to making Alun Michael Welsh First Minister. But holding a referendum you were bound to lose goes down as the silliest. Minister responsible: John Prescott.

10. The 2003 Reshuffle. This was the one that was supposed to create a Ministry of Justice and abolish the Lord Chancellorship together with the Scottish and Welsh Offices. It was all reversed within hours of being announced. Minister responsible: Tony Blair.

Another fine New Labour mess

As the proud owner of a two-bed cottage that is alas rapidly becoming too small for our growing family, I am personally delighted that Home Information Packs are being delayed until 1 August and will even then only affect the sale of four-bed houses. But what a total fiasco for the Government.

I trust for their sakes that the thousands of people who dumped their homes on the market simultaneously this month in a bid to beat the original June 1 deadline and as a result were forced to take well below the asking price in a buyers' market will not be asking for compensation....

Fare ye well Kevin

A good friend of mine from Sheffield, Kevin Bolster, is cycling from John O Groats to Lands End in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support starting later this week. He's also started a blog to let us know how he's getting on. Interested to see that one of my very favourite places, Llanthony Priory, is on the itinerary.

Was Brown's coronation a historical inevitability?

Not at all, I argue in my weekly column in today's Newcastle Journal. Here are some extracts.

***

"The first thing to say about Gordon Brown's unopposed elevation to the leadership of the Labour Party is that it represents a stupendous achievement...political history is full of front-runners who led from the tape only to be overhauled in the final few metres before the line.

I'll be honest, there was a time last month when I briefly thought it might happen to Brown, when all around seemed to be clamouring for a contest and the Chancellor's stock appeared to be falling rapidly.

By the end, Mr Brown's coronation had an air of inevitability about it, all rival contenders having fallen by the wayside, all the passion that has been expended on Labour's tribal feuding seemingly spent.

But actually, there was nothing historically inevitable about this week's events. It could easily all have turned out very differently.

The downfall of David Blunkett, after he lost his head over Kimberley Quinn, will I believe come to be seen as a major turning point in the history of New Labour.

Had he still been in the Cabinet, he would have been the very clear and obvious alternative to Gordon and, with his more compelling personal "back story," may well have been able to beat him.

Darlington MP Alan Milburn's decision to leave the Cabinet in 2003 and again in 2005 also removed a potentially big player from the succession stakes.

Mr Milburn, far more so than South Shields MP David Miliband, was the natural "heir to Blair," and though an intellectual pygmy besides Brown, his looks and charisma could have made him a contender."

Full text is available HERE.

My vote for Cruddas

I'm not going to make a huge song and dance about it, but I've decided I will be supporting Jon Cruddas for Labour's deputy leadership. There was a time when I might have supported Peter Hain but although I still have a lot of sympathy for some of his ideas on tax I think a fresher face - along with fresher thinking - is required now. Jon is the only candidate in this election who will bring a genuinely new perspective to policy-making and genuinely seek to ensure that the views of mainstream Labour members are heard.

After some initial misgivings, I have come round to the view that the Deputy Prime Minister and the Deputy Leader need not be the same person, and that if Jon does win, Gordon Brown would be quite within his powers to appoint someone else to the DPM post.

The Deputy Leadership Revisited

The last time I conducted a POLL on Labour's deputy leadership, it produced the following result from blog readers.

Jon Cruddas 35%
Hilary Benn 28%
Alan Johnson 7%
Peter Hain 5%
Harriet Harman 4%
Hazel Blears 3%
Jack Straw 3%
None of the above 15%

Now that the contest is live, I'm running the poll again HERE, minus Straw who is no longer a candidate and without the None of the above option. It will be interesting to see whether opinion has shifted over the last couple of months.

David Bamber RIP

I can't claim to have been a friend of Dave's, but we worked together in the regional lobby for a couple of years in the 1990s and I was shocked to read this via Tom Watson. I share Tom's assessment of his rapier-like wit and quick mind.

The right man wins

It's a pity, in a way, that there wasn't a contest. Had either the hard left or the uber-Blairite right succeeded in launching a challenge to Gordon Brown for the leadership of the Labour Party, they would have been rightly humiliated and Gordon's mandate for taking the party in a fresh, post-Blairite direction would have been strengthened.

But no matter, the important thing is that Gordon Brown will become Prime Minister on June 27, 2007 and for once in politics, the right man has finished first.

The speculation will continue about why first David Miliband, then John Reid, then finally Charles Clarke all ruled themselves out of the running, about why John Denham didn't spot the opportunity of a challenge from the sensible left, about why a trail of past would-be contenders from Stephen Byers to David Blunkett to Alan Milburn all fell one by one by the wayside.

But the single biggest reason was because Gordon was, all along, the best candidate - and his opponents knew it.

Over the past few months, there has been a concerted attempt on the right-wing blogosphere to portray Gordon Brown as both sinister and sleazy. This has gone way beyond the normal left-right party politicking, and has demonstrated at times an intensely personal dislike of Brown on the part of the ringleaders.

This has included accusations that Gordon abused his position by allowing a charity set up in memory of his close friend and mentor John Smith to use No 11 Downing Street, and various spurious attempts to link him into the cash-for-honours affair.

Had I joined in this witch-hunt, I have no doubt that my monthly traffic figures would now be soaring towards six figures. As it is, it is pretty clear from my stats that some people of a right-ish persuasion stopped reading my blog because they wanted to read bile about Gordon Brown, and didn't want to hear that he is a genuine guy with deeply-held values. So be it.

It's obvious why the Tory bloggers hate him so. They knew all along that he was the man who will show their leader David Cameron up to be the sub-Blair pretender that he is, and so set out to hobble him below the knees before he had even stood up against Cameron at the Despatch Box.

But if Brown's triumph is a victory against these politically-motivated bloggers, it is also a victory against a mainstream media which seemed determined to provoke a challenge for its own savage amusement.

Improbably led by the Labour-supporting Guardian and its Sunday stablemate the Observer, certain newspapers set out over a number of weeks to create the conditions in which a Cabinet-level challenge became seen as inevitable.

The intention was that, in the days following Blair's resignation announcement, the clamour would reach such a fever-pitch that some opportunist somewhere would be persuaded to dance to the media's tune. Indeed I myself fully expected that this would be the case.

As things turned out, it seems I both under-estimated the good sense of Brown's would-be opponents, and over-estimated the power of my former profession. And for that, I am grateful.

So who's Gordon supporting, then?

For a long time I have believed that Jon Cruddas might be the secret Gordon Brown candidate in the Labour deputy leadership election, mainly because he doesn't want to be DPM and Gordon doesn't really want one. Analysis of the nominations, however, strongly suggests that Harriet Harman is the favoured one.

Although Brownite blogging MP Tom Watson is indeed supporting Cruddas, the nomination list for Harperson looks like a roll-call of Brown's inner circle.

Key lieutenants of El Gordo plumping for Mrs Dromey include: Douglas Alexander, Nick Brown, Tom Clarke, Yvette Cooper, Alistair Darling, Nigel Griffiths, Geoff Hoon, Kevan Jones, Ed Miliband and Michael Wills.

Watson aside, the only ones among the Chancellor's intimates standing aloof from the Harman campaign are Ed Balls, who plumps for Alan Johnson, John Healey, who goes for Hilary Benn, and Doug Henderson, who is yet to nominate.

Continued May 17. Following on from the above, I supopose that if it is the case that Gordon is backing Harriet the obvious question is why? If he thinks that she is the candidate to help Labour reach the parts of the electorate that he himself can't reach, I fear he is much mistaken.

For once, I agree with Tony Blair in his assessment of Harman's claims to represent the voice of Middle England. "Middle England? Middle Islington maybe."

In fact Harriet Harman is regarded by much of Middle England as a champagne socialist - a breed they despise with far more venom than straightforward cloth-capped lefties like John Prescott. I may not like her boyfriend much, but Fiona Millar is spot-on with this piece on CiF today.

As it is, I don't think the unofficial "endorsement" of the Brownite camp is likely to be helpful to HH. Having been deprived of a contest for the leadership, I think Labour members are slightly in the mood to be counter-suggestible where the deputy leadership is concerned.

It's political balance that matters

With the Labour Deputy Leadership Contest now coming to the boil, there has been much talk over the last 24 hours of who will make the best "partner" for Gordon Brown. The clear view of Alan Johnson is that he would because he comes from a working-class background in London as opposed to Gordon's middle-class Scottish upbringing.

The clear analogy being drawn here is with the Tony Blair-John Prescott partnership, with Prescott himself now publicly backing his fellow Hull MP's bid to succeed him.

But Johnson and Co are missing the point. Blair-Prescott was not the successful partnership that it was on account of the fact that Prezza is "working class." It is because, politically, Prescott represented a different strand of the Labour movement from Blair, enabling the party's traditional supporters to feel as if they had a voice at the top table, even if this wasn't always necessarily the case.

Similarly, Harriet Harman is wrong to stress, as she has done on a number of occasions, the importance of gender-balance in the selection of a leadership team. It's certainly important that women are well-represented in Gordon's Cabinet - and with Yvette Cooper and Caroline Flint set for big promotions, they will be - but you don't have to have a female deputy leader to appeal to women voters.

No, it's political balance that counts, which is why I am of the view that neither Harman, nor Johnson, nor Hilary Benn would necessarily be the best candidates on offer. All of them are virtually ideologically indistinguishable from Gordon, and none of them can genuinely claim to have carved out a distinctive policy agenda.

The Labour Party could, if it wanted to, achieve a sort of "balance" by electing the uber-Blairite candidate, Hazel Blears, but that would merely give it a balance between New Labour's own tribal factions, ignoring the large swathe of party members who see themselves as neither New Labour nor Old Labour, just Labour.

If the party is looking for a more meaningful balance between the New Labour "right" and what I call the "sensible left," then the two candidates who would offer the best counterpoint to Gordon are Peter Hain and Jon Cruddas.

Hain looks certain to get on the ballot paper, Cruddas slightly less so, but whichever of them eventually emerges as the standard bearer of the disenfranchised mainstream left in this election is the one who will get my support.