Brown and the Libs: Some Questions

Politics is not rocket science, and the motives of those who engage in it are usually pretty transparent, but to me, there are an unusually large number of unanswered questions about the strange affair of Gordon Brown's attempt to bring senior Lib Dems into his Cabinet. Here's a few that haven't already been exhaustively covered on today's blogosphere.

* What will be the effect of this on morale within the Labour Party? Now that Gordon Brown has made clear he believes he needs to look outside the party to construct his Cabinet, will Labour MPs feel that their 300-odd nominations have been flung back in their faces?

* Will Peter Hain still be Northern Ireland Secretary after next Wednesday? If so, how will he feel about the fact that his job was offered to Paddy Ashdown?

* Does the fact that Brown made that job offer mean that he is going to retain the territorial Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish departments in government rather than create an umbrella department of nations and regions as had been rumoured?

* Would Paddy Ashdown still have said no if he had been offered the job of Foreign Secretary (as, surely, he should have been if the alternatives are more of Maggie Beckett or a comeback for Jack Straw?)

* What was Ashdown up to leaking the story to the Guardian's editor Alan Rusbridger, when he must have realised this would cause ten tons of shit to descend on the head of his leader Ming Campbell? Was he just being vain, or has he too decided that Ming is a liability?

* Will the Lib Dems in fact blame Ming, or will they just see this as a rather devious manoeuvre by Brown to get the plaudits for appearing open and inclusive without having to suffer the inconvenience of actually having the Lib Dums in his Cabinet?

* Similarly, will the public really see this as an attempt by Brown to create a "new politics," or simply as a prime example of the way the old politics works, ie completely shafting the leader of an opposition party, who also happens to be an "old friend?"

* If Ming falls and a more media-friendly figure like Chris Huhne or Nick Clegg becomes leader, could the ultimate loser in the whole affair be David Cameron, with the "liberal Conservative" vote returning to the Lib Dems?

I don't profess to know the answer to any of these questions - but it seems there is enough food for thought here not only to keep the blogosphere occupied for days but to keep historians occupied for years.

There's always a price worth paying

"Unemployment is a good and fair price to pay for low inflation."

- Norman Lamont, 1992, House of Commons. *

"Are you saying that lost North jobs are an acceptable price to pay to curb inflation in the South?" "Yes, I suppose in a sense I am."

- Sir Edward George, 1998, in reply to a question from yours truly.

"If you want to keep the union together, the Barnett Formula is a small price to pay,"

- Tony Blair, 2007, speaking at the Liaison Committee of senior MPs.

* Unclear as to whether this was his own phrase or one written for him by his researcher, D. Cameron.

Piara Khabra - a Lasting Tribute

Earlier today I left a link on Iain Dale's blog alerting readers to this tribute to the Ealing MP Piara Khabra, whose death was announced today.

This has since attracted some comment to the effect that I should have mentioned my involvement in the digital obits site Lasting Tribute, which I currently run for Associated Northcliffe Digital.

Well, as anyone who has visited this blog will know, I have in fact been quite open about my role as the launch project manager for LT, which went live six weeks ago.

Although I'm obviously biased, I'm very proud of the site. As well as Khabra, those of a political bent will find there obituaries to, among others, Bernard Weatherill, Sir Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Barbara Castle, John Smith and Sir Winston Churchill.

Marr-sterful

I have always had slightly mixed feelings about Andrew Marr. On a personal level, I have no hesitation in saying he is one of the most generous-sprited and courteous men I have met in political journalism. Unlike many of his senior Lobby colleagues, he never adopted a loftier-than-thou approach to those of us on the lower rungs of the profession and would always pass the time of day with anyone who happened to coincide with him in the Press Bar.

On a professional level, though, I always believed he was slightly too close to New Labour for comfort in the job of BBC political editor. Never was this more exemplified than when, on the day of Dr David Kelly's death, he informed us that Alastair Campbell was basically a decent bloke who would be as devastated as anyone by the tragedy, when a more detached and sceptical reporter might have posed some of the key questions that Campbell would now have to answer about how Dr Kelly's name had been leaked.

So I believe Marr made the right call in leaving that particular job to move on to more general presenting, and this was amply borne-out by his History of Modern Britain which concluded on BBC2 last night. It is sometimes said that journalism is merely a rough first draft of history, but this was as authoritative an account of contemporary British life as we are likely to get from any professional historian.

Sure, there were omissions, probably due to the need to condense fifty years into five hours. The Callaghan premiership, which delivered two years of stable and enlightened government from 1976-78 before the chaos of the Winter of Discontent, was virtually ignored. And the impact of New Labour on the countryside, including foot and mouth, the fox-hunting ban and the destruction of the green belt, merited not a mention. But on the whole, this was a tour-de-force which showed that Marr has finally found his niche.

The programme which, in my view, defined the series, was last week's one on Margaret Thatcher, concluding that, for good or ill, "we are all Thatcher's children now." I still can't really forgive Thatcher for the destruction of the deep-mining industry, for desecrating the once-thriving pit villages that formed the backdrop to my early career in journalism around Mansfield, Notts. But from an objective standpoint, I do recognise that, alongside Tim Berners-Lee, she is chiefly responsible for the way we live now.

And this, in turn, demonstrates that Tony Blair, the main subject of last night's final programmme, was not in the first rank of Prime Ministers in the sense that Thatcher was - a fact that Marr, for all his previous closeness to New Labour, seemed to acknowledge when he showed an ironical clip of himself telling the nation that Blair had become "a bigger man" as a result of the Iraq invasion and the toppling of Saddam. In fact he became a much diminshed one - but in his tacit acceptance that even the best reporters sometimes get it wrong, Marr became a "bigger man" himself.

What if Blair had sacked Brown?

Today's Guardian front page - apart from being a rather obvious plug by Patrick Wintour for his mate Andrew Rawnsley's new TV documentary - begs the question of what would have happened had Tony Blair actually sacked Gordon Brown as Cherie Blair and others were apparently urging him to do?

I think I know the answer: Instead of still being a week or so away from entering No 10, Gordon Brown would already have been Prime Minister for several years.

Blair's big opportunity to sack Brown - probably his only opportunity when you think about it - came in 2001 on the back of his second election landslide. Right up until election day, there were strong rumours that he would attempt to move Brown to the Foreign Office, and that Brown might well choose to go to the backbenches rather than accept.

In the event, it didn't happen, and Blair was never again in a position of sufficient strength to contemplate moving the Chancellor. Indeed, by the time the following election came round in 2005, he practically needed to beg Gordon to ride to the rescue of Labour's flagging campaign.

So what would have happened had Blair gone ahead? Well, I suspect all would have been fine and dandy for a couple of years until the Government ran up against the issue of what to do about Iraq. Let's just assume for the sake of argument that Blair would have acted no differently, and that the consequences of the invasion - the dodgy dossier, the Kelly affair, the Hutton whitewash, the Butler report - would have played out exactly as they did.

To my mind, had there been someone of the stature of Gordon Brown on the backbenches at the time, an obvious alternative Prime Minister who was untained by any of what had gone on during the war and the whole grisly aftermath, there would have been a huge clamour both inside and outside the Labour Party for him to take over.

In short, I think that Blair would have fallen in the aftermath of the Kelly/Hutton affair, Brown would have gone on to win a much bigger election victory than Blair actually achieved in 2005, and the Tories would still be looking at a two-election strategy to get back into contention for power.

Of course, Blair was too smart an operator not to have realised all this, which is one of the reasons why he stuck with Brown through thick and thin. Much as he may have felt like strangling him at times, he always knew that it was better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.

Blog wars over - official

Well, let's hope so, anyway.