Another missed opportunity for Brown

Time is fast running out for the Prime Minister to provide us with a good reason to re-elect him. Here's today's Journal column.

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As the date of the next general election draws ever nearer, so the remaining windows of opportunity for a revival in Gordon Brown's political fortunes continue to dwindle in number.

In the calendar of set-piece political events, perhaps his best hope of an uplift came with his speech to Labour's conference seven weeks ago, but as I noted in last week's column, The Sun newspaper put paid to that.

Still to come are the pre-Budget report, the Budget itself, and the proposed TV debates with David Cameron, which could yet see the lightweight Tory leader laid out by Mr Brown’s fabled Big Clunking Fist.

But as opportunities go to set out a compelling set of reasons why Labour should remain in power for a fourth term, this week's Queen's Speech has to go down as yet another missed one.

Mr Brown's allies would claim that, with only a maximum of seven months of the current parliament to go before the election has to be held, setting out too ambitious a programme would have invited ridicule.

But surely even ridicule would have been better than the collective "so what?" from the public which seems to have greeted this timid set of proposals.

Despite the criticisms of MPs expenses watchdog Sir Christopher Kelly, it was not so much the absence of a specific piece of legislation to tackle that issue that was the problem.

As the government has pointed out, it is not clear that it requires primary legislation to sort it out anyway, and even if it does, ministers can always resort to Her Majesty's customary catch-all phrase: "Other measures will be laid before you."

No, the real problem with Wednesday's package, as with so much else the Brown government has done, is the lack of any connective tissue to tie these disparate policy threads into a 'Big Idea.'

At one time, before Mr Brown came into office, it seemed likely that the leitmotif of his premiership would be a drive to restore public trust in politics after the spin and sleaze of the Blair years.

In the end, those bright hopes were shot to pieces by a combination of the Prime Minister's timidity, the “smeargate” affair involving his adviser Damien McBride, and finally the expenses scandal.

But this should have been a cue for the government to step up the process of constitutional change, not relegate it to the backburner.

As it is, the only concrete constitutional reform pledge contained in the Queen's Speech is to abolish the absurd "by-election" for Lords' seats for hereditary peers which occurs each time one of them shuffles off this mortal coil.

The fact that hereditary peers remain in the House of Lords at all is almost - but not quite - as savage an indictment of 12 years of Labour rule as the fact that inequality has increased.

The government paid due recognition to this by having Her Majesty utter a solemn pledge to "narrow the gap between rich and poor" - but, like all the other positive measures in the Speech, it begs the doorstep response: "Why didn't you do it in the first place."

If Mr Brown does survive to lead Labour into the election next Spring, that is perhaps the hardest question he and his party will have to answer.

Regaining sympathy not the same as regaining trust

The Sun's quite disgraceful personal attacks on the Prime Minister over his letter to Jacqui Janes understandably swung some public sympathy behind him this week. But neither that nor the Glasgow North East by-election result means he is necessarily "safe." Here's today's Journal column.

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Six weeks ago, The Sun newspaper torpedoed Gordon Brown's hopes of a party conference uplift by announcing on the evening of his keynote speech that it would be backing the Tories at the next general election.

At the time, I was among those who sought to downplay the significance of this, arguing on these pages that it was no more than a right-wing newspaper returning to its natural ideological home.

But if I’m honest, I was swimming against the tide on this. Most of the media seem to take The Sun’s own estimation of itself as the paper ‘wot won’ every election since the 1960s completely at face value.

Hence the paper’s switch after 12 years of loyal support for New Labour was reported as a political event of huge symbolic importance which drove yet another nail in the government’s coffin.

Perhaps, though, they were right. We have seen over the past week just what a dangerous opponent The Sun can be when it has it in mind to ‘go for’ a particular politician.

It used an error-strewn handwritten letter he wrote to grieving mum Jacqui Janes expressing his condolences at the loss of her son in Afghanistan to mount a highly personal attack on the Prime Minister.

It’s all becoming very reminiscent of the latter days of John Major – another well-intentioned PM who seemingly could do nothing right and who incurred the wrath of a certain red-top tabloid as a consequence.

Who could forget the Sun editor on Black Wednesday who promised to take two large buckets of something unmentionable and empty them all over poor old Mr Major’s head?

But if that at least had the merit of humour, on this occasion the paper appears to have over-reached itself.

As the sheer ferocity of its attack became clear, the public’s sympathy seems for once to have swung towards Mr Brown.

Ironically, had the paper not previously announced its intention to support the Conservatives, its reporting of the whole episode might have had a greater political impact.

But as Alastair Campbell rightly pointed out: “Precisely because they made such a splash with the switch to the Tories, the wider public now know more than ever that their coverage is politically driven and totally biased against Brown.”

The Sun also has something of a credibility gap with some sections of the public on issues such as these – as David Higgerson, a former Journal political correspondent now plying his trade on Merseyside, was not slow to point out.

“Nobody in Liverpool needs reminding about the sick irony involved when The Sun decides to have a pop at somebody for being insensitive,” he wrote on his blog.

As it is, a difficult week for Mr Brown has ended on a triumphant note with Labour’s unexpectedly comfortable victory in the Glasgow North-East by-election caused by the defenestration of Mr Speaker Martin over his handling of the expenses affair.

It did not take long for the Prime Minister’s loyal ally, Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy, to claim the party’s thumping 8,111 majority over the SNP as “an endorsement of Gordon Brown and what he is trying to do.”

But is it? Earlier this week, South Shields MP David Miliband’s decision to turn down the chance to become EU Foreign Minister led to more speculation that he could yet take as Labour leader before the next election.

A defeat for Labour in Glasgow North-East on Thursday might have raised that speculation to fever pitch.

As it is, the consensus among political commentators last night was that the result will make Mr Brown “safe” from any further attempts to unseat him – but I’m not at all sure they’re right.

The Prime Minister may have garnered some public sympathy this week. But regaining the public’s sympathy is a long way from regaining its trust.

Sympathy for Icarus

Slob returns with a reminder that you should never fly too close to The Sun. More on the red-top's little disagreement with Gordon in tomorrow's weekly column.