A history lesson from PB.com

So far as I know, David Herdson does not have his own blog but he is one of the most regular posters on PoliticalBetting.com. His posts are always well worth a read but this comment published earlier today is the kind of thing I wish I had written myself. It is one of the best explanations I have read as to why Gordon Brown will be the next Prime Minister, and I will quote it in full.

A quick(ish) word on the form of picking replacement leaders. Parties in opposition behave differently from parties in government because they can afford to take more of a risk in the hope that their man or woman will come good before the election in a few years’ time; PM’s have to come good from day 1.

Going through the leaders of the opposition chosen since 1945 we have: Gaitskell (former chancellor - briefly), Wilson (former middle ranking cabinet minister but very prominent by 1963), Heath (former middle ranking cabinet minister), Thatcher (same), Foot (likewise, though more experienced), Kinnock (backbencher on a mission), Smith (former junior cabinet minister but a prominent member of the shadow cabinet by 1992), Blair (rising member of the shadow cabinet; no experience in government), Hague (ex-junior member of the cabinet), IDS (backbencher in during the Tory government), Howard (former Home Secretary) and Cameron (young man on a mission, short time in the shadow cabinet). Most have cabinet experience, few have spent any time in a senior government position; the average age on election is in their 40s.

People who become PM other than through leading the opposition come almost exclusively from the highest cabinet positions. As it occurs less frequently I’ve taken the whole of the 20th century for examples: Balfour (leader of the House, but de facto deputy prime minister), Asquith (chancellor), Lloyd-George (ex-chancellor but by 1916, minister for doing the things the PM should have been doing were he not drunk), Baldwin (1923 - chancellor), Baldwin (1935 - leader of the house and de facto deputy/joint prime minister), Chamberlain (chancellor), Churchill (an exception, but still a vastly experienced member of cabinet and unquestionably the stand out leader in waiting), Eden (foreign secretary), Macmillan (chancellor), Douglas-Home (foreign secretary), Callaghan (foreign secretary), Major (chancellor).

Nearly all PM’s chosen in office come from the Treasury or Foreign office and those that don’t tend to be the dominant figure of their day other than the PM - and in some cases, including the PM. As Brown obviously fits both categories, it would be a major break with the pattern were he to be overlooked. The people who became PM rarely got there because their office gave them seniority in the party; it was their seniority and ability that got them the office. The dynamics have been the same over a century and more and I for one wouldn’t back against such strong form.

Equidistance is now the only policy that makes sense

For a politician whose experience was supposed to be his greatest asset, Sir Menzies Campbell displayed an extremely poor grasp of recent political history in allowing his party's spring conference to be overshadowed by speculation about who the Lib Dems would back in a hung Parliament and the suggestion that they would sustain a minority Labour government in power.

Before anyone tries to exonerate Ming by blaming the rogue briefing on some lowly press officer, I don't think that whether or not this was "authorised" is really the issue. It should have been made absolutely crystal clear that the whole subject was in fact completely off-limits, and this Ming and his chief-of-staff Ed Davey clearly failed to do.

Had Ming made a closer study of the 1987 election campaign in which he was originally elected to Parliament, he would have realised why. The Alliance campaign that year was wrecked by the fact that David Steel and David Owen each gave different answers to the question - Steel saying it was "inconceivable" he could do a deal with Mrs Thatcher - still alive it seems - and Owen maintaining he could never work with Neil Kinnock.

Similarly, in 1992, all Labour's talk of PR in the last week of the campaign strengthened the impression that a Lib Dem vote was a vote for Kinnock, swinging vital votes back to the Tories at the eleventh hour.

Maybe Campbell was trying to follow the example of his predecessor-but-one Paddy Ashdown, who formally abandoned "equidistance" after that election and came clean about the fact that he wanted a coalition with New Labour. At the time, it made good politics, enabling the Lib Dems to benefit from the wave of tactical anti-Tory voting that swept the country in 1997 and, to a slightly lesser extent, in 2001.

But thanks to the phenomenon of "tactical unwind," those days are behind us now. It follows that positioning the Lib Dems too closely to either of the two main parties is likely to prove counter-productive, especially in what is likely to be a very close race.

It is clear that in some respects, the Lib Dems remain to the left of Labour, notably on Iraq. It is also fairly obvious that Ming Campbell is more of an ideological bedfellow with Gordon Brown than with David Cameron.

But that means they need to work doubly hard not to give the impression that a vote for Campbell is a vote for Labour. I can't imagine this being a mistake that Chris Huhne would have made.

The Kamikaze mission

Is the "Stop Gordon" mission by the Blairite ultras doomed to destruction, or will it explode Gordon Brown's hopes of the premiership? My full take on Alan Milburn's 2020 vision initiative can be found in my Newcastle Journal column, HERE and as a Podcast HERE.

Interestingly, Recess Monkey reports that Gerald Kaufman has been overheard telling colleagues that the "ultras" have already found their candidate, and that s/he has agreed to stand. Let's hope he has better luck with this prediction than his overnight announcement of the death of Margaret Thatcher.