A lot done, a lot still to do

Gordon Brown's fightback may have begun in Manchester on Tuesday - but there is still a very long way to go. Here's my column from today's Newcastle Journal.

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There are some Labour conference speeches that literally changed history. Tony Blair’s ditching of Clause IV in 1994. Neil Kinnock’s murderous assault on Militant in 1985. Nye Bevan’s stand against unilateralism in 1957.

Gordon Brown has never been in the Blair, Kinnock or Bevan class as an orator. His talents as a platform speaker have never been more than slightly on the better side of workmanlike.

Yet this week, our beleaguered Prime Minister gave himself a fighting chance of making what would truly be a history-making return from the ranks of the political walking dead.

Sure, he is not yet even close to being out of the woods. But in Manchester on Tuesday, he finally delivered the speech that his admirers have wanted to hear him make ever since he took over as Labour leader 15 months ago.

During the Blair years, we became accustomed to regarding the Labour Party as a devastatingly successful electoral machine, but one that seemed devoid of any real values.

The party appeared to have moved a long, long way from Harold Wilson’s famous description of it as “a moral crusade or nothing.”

Mr Brown has not restored that lost moral compass at a stroke. Mere words alone cannot accomplish that.

But on Tuesday, in setting out his vision of the “fair society,” he finally reminded his party why it exists.

In a way, events have moved in his favour. The global financial meltdown has finally demonstrated the limits of free-market capitalism and made the idea of state intervention fashionable again.

As one commentator put it: “Labour folk have seized on the collapse and bailout of the big banks as evidence that the neo-liberal era is over.”

Hence it is made easier for Mr Brown to say on Tuesday that his “new settlement for new times” must be “a settlement where both markets and governments are seen to be the servants of the people, not their masters.”

To the biggest cheers of the day he added: “Just as those who supported the dogma of big government were proved wrong, so too those who argue for the dogma of unbridled market forces have been proved wrong.”

But though this was duly lapped up by the faithful, Mr Brown didn’t really get into his stride until he started to talk about his “fairness agenda” – the real emotional core of Tuesday’s address.

“Why do we always strive for fairness? Not because it makes good soundbites. Not because it gives good photo opportunities. Not because it makes for good PR. No. We do it because fairness is in our DNA,” he said.

“It's who we are - and what we're for. It's why Labour exists. It's our first instinct, the soul of our party. It's why when things get tough, we get tougher."

Here, at last, was some recognition that the Labour Party does indeed have a higher purpose than simply staying in power.

And yet., and yet……the towering question that, for me, hangs over this week’s events in Manchester is why Mr Brown could not have made that speech 12 months ago.

Had he chosen to set out his vision then, rather than winding-up the Tories about an early election, it is at least arguable that the collapse in public support for him over the past year would not have happened.

As it is, Mr Brown has done no more than buy himself a bit more time this week in which to try to turn a desperate political situation around.

The early signs are good – one poll showed a 7pc bounce for Labour in the wake of the speech – but the rhetoric must now be backed up with more action if the momentum is to be maintained.

Mr Brown can at least reassure himself that his main rival, Foreign Secretary and South Shields MP David Miliband, had an uncommonly bad week.

He found himself on the wrong end of the Prime Minister’s clever two-in-one put-down "this is no time for a novice” – a line which had the brutal touch of Alastair Campbell written all over it.

Mr Miliband also got into hot water by being overheard comparing himself to the erstwhile Tory leadership pretender, Michael Heseltine.

Wrong, David. Michael Heseltine was a man of courage who resigned from a government on a point of principle and later openly challenged the most powerful Prime Minister of modern times.

Some of the shine was inevitably knocked off the Prime Minister’s speech by the 3am news of Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly’s resignation the following morning, but like so much in politics, this turned out to be cock-up rather than conspiracy.

Dark rumours had initially swirled around Manchester that Ms Kelly was part of a nefarious Blairite plot to undermine Mr Brown in his moment of triumph.

The truth was rather more prosaic. It appears that a Downing Street press officer got into a rather heavy session with some journalists in a hotel bar and became a trifle indiscreet.

It shows that things haven’t changed all that much in the five years since I last attended a party conference as Journal political editor.

For Mr Brown, the prospect of another humiliating by-election defeat, in Glenrothes in early November, still hangs over him like a sword of Damocles

The reshuffle, too, looks ever more problematical. Rumours persist that a cadre of ministers will refuse to be moved or even refuse to serve in a clear challenge to Mr Brown’s authority.

Over him, too, hangs the twin spectres of Sir Menzies Campbell in 2007 and Iain Duncan Smith in 2003, two leaders who got rapturous receptions from their party conferences yet were gone within weeks.

The Prime Minister made a great speech on Tuesday. But he has a long way to go before he alters what still seems to be the inevitable tide of history.

Ruth's choice **updated**

I know not why Ruth Kelly has announced her intention to resign from the Cabinet. Some will probably be prepared to take her assertion that she needs to spend more time with her family at face value. Others will hint that she is part of the plot to undermine the Prime Minister. My view, for what it's worth, is that it probably has something to do with the ongoing row within the government over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, as some Labour conference sources have apparently already suggested.**

If this is the case, then I applaud Ruth for taking an honourable course in relation to a truly baleful piece of legislation. If more ministers are indeed considering resigning as we keep being told, then they should perhaps consider resigning over this rather than in protest at Gordon's leadership.

The HFE Bill was wrong on three counts - wrong to sanction to use of hybrid-human embryos when there is no proven scentific need to do so, wrong to further undermine the position of fathers in today's society by removing the legal requirement for doctors prescribing IVF treatment to take account of a child's need for one, and wrong not to take the opportunity to adjust the time-limit for abortion to take account of medical advances which in exceptional circumstances can allow babies born at 22, 23 or 24 weeks to survive.

Ruth's decision has focused my thoughts on a long-standing personal dilemma of my own in relation to the same issue, to which I will return shortly.

** Thursday 25 Sept update: Apparently it was none of these things. It was, in a word - as they say by way of explanation for the multifarious "big cat" stories that appear here in Derbyshire from time to time - alcohol.

The lost moral compass restored

Gordon Brown has always been a man with a huge sense of Labour history. And while his speech to the party's conference today was certainly focused on the present and future, it was also deeply rooted in the history of the party.

Harold Wilson used to say the Labour Party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. During the Tony Blair years, it was pretty clear that it had become nothing. Yet in one passage of today's speech, Mr Brown restored the moral purpose that has been missing from the party for so long.

"And why do we always strive for fairness? Not because it makes good soundbites. Not because it gives good photo opportunities. Not because it makes for good PR. No. We do it because fairness is in our DNA. It's who we are - and what we're for. It's why Labour exists. It's our first instinct, the soul of our party. It's why when things get tough, we get tougher."

Although the pundits will doubtless focus on his clever two-in-one put-down of the two Davids - "This is no time for a novice" - this, for me, was the key message of the speech, a reminder to the country that this party is about more than simply a desire to stay in power for as long as possible.

The message was underlined, near the very end of the speech, by Mr Brown's use of the phrase "United we are a great movement."

The words "This Great Movement Of Ours" or "TGMOO" used to be practically obligatory in Labour leader's speeches in the pre-Blair days, but references to Labour as a "movement" went dramatically out of fashion during the NuLab era, presumably because, like "moral crusade," the word implies some higher purpose. The idealists among us will be pleased to see it back again.

The good old, bad old days...

If like me you miss the good old, bad old days when Labour conferences were effectively pitched battles between the leadership on the platform and the delegates on the floor, you'll have enjoyed this bit of reminiscing today from Neil Kinnock and James Naughtie. There's an excerpt from Kinnock's great Bournemouth '85 speech at 6.03 minutes in.

Where are they now No 4

The latest edition of Total Politics is now in circulation together with the fourth instalment of my "Where Are They Now?" series of columns. This one focuses on the Liberal Democrat David Bellotti who won one of the most significant by-elections in modern times in 1990, but whose newsworthiness lay less in his rather inconsequential political career and more in having been one of the worst football club proprietors in the history of the game.

How the Prawn Cocktail Offensive skewered New Labour

What with global economic meltdown and the ongoing crisis over Gordon Brown's leadership, poor Nick Clegg found himself struggling for attention this week. Here's today's column from the Newcastle Journal.

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There is an old and venerable tradition in this column, going back a decade or more, that each September the Liberal Democrats get an annual opportunity to bask in the Linford, er, spotlight.

It’s only fair, after all, that a party that is invariably subjected to the third-party squeeze should have at least once chance each year to get its message across.

They certainly need it, with one poll this week showing the party’s share of the vote down to 12pc – its lowest standing since the early days of Paddy Ashdown’s leadership.

Two changes of leader since 2005 have not altered the party’s fundamental problem: that the Tory revival under David Cameron looks set to deprive it of most of its MPs in the South and West, with few corresponding gains from Labour in the North.

New-ish leader Nick Clegg did at least demonstrate this week that, like Mr Cameron, he too can make a speech without notes, even if he needed the help of a set of giant autocues all around the conference hall in Bournemouth.

And he did demonstrate a determination to reach out to voters on both right and left, in a tactically clever speech that managed to be both redistributionist and tax-cutting.

But sorry chaps, it is impossible, for this year at least, for me to devote to your conference the level of attention to which you have become accustomed in previous years.

In a week which saw both continuing global economic meltdown and the beginnings of a concrete challenge to Gordon Brown’s leadership, the events in Bournemouth were no more than a sideshow.

It was a desperate, desperate week for the Prime Minister. As he battles to save his premiership, the one thing he needed above all was a trouble-free run-in to his party’s conference.

But his hopes of presiding over a moreorless united gathering in Manchester were shot to pieces last Friday evening when junior whip Siobhain McDonough went public with her call for a leadership challenge.

Ms McDonough was followed out of the door by party vice-chair Joan Ryan and special envoy Barry Gardiner, while another 12 MPs put their name to a barely-coded call for leadership change.

Finally, on Tuesday, came the resignation of David Cairns, Minister of State at the Scotland Office and the most senior figure so far to put his head above the parapet.

The rebels are as yet small in number. But it’s not about numbers so much as momentum, and the momentum is with the rebels.
Thus far, the revolt has spread from a couple of obscure backbenchers to former cabinet ministers to the whips office to the parliamentary private secretaries and finally to a minister of state.

It is surely now only a matter of time before it spreads to the Cabinet, with Barrow MP and Business Secretary John Hutton the overwhelming favourite to wield the knife.

The fact that Mr Hutton could not bring himself to condemn those MPs who have called for a leadership challenge this week was surely significant.

I myself have thought it likely for some time that Mr Brown would face a challenge this autumn, and before the recess, I argued on these pages that he probably should face one.

That said, it would have made a certain amount of sense for the rebels to hear what Mr Brown had to say in his conference speech before rushing to judgement about his prospects.

What the rebels are effectively saying is that there is nothing he can possibly say in his speech on Monday that can make any difference to his public standing – which is a somewhat crass position to adopt.

They may well be right – but if so, why not wait until after the speech before speaking out? It would, after all, only serve to make their argument that much stronger.

The one thing, it seems, that might rescue Mr Brown, is the continuing economic turmoil resulting from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the near-collapse of HBOS.

It certainly seems to have removed the immediate threat. As Harriet Harman said on Question Time, holding a leadership contest while people are worried about their jobs and savings would make little sense to the public.

It is a seductively persuasive argument, but the events of the past week have not removed the Prime Minister’s underlying political weakness. Indeed, if anything, they have intensified it.

What we are actually seeing is the old argument about Mr Brown being the “best person” to deal with economic turmoil being turned on its head. Increasingly, people are in fact blaming him for the mess.

The Prime Minister’s announcement on Thursday about “cleaning up the city” is a case in point. If it needs “cleaning up” now, what on earth was Mr Brown doing as Chancellor for 10 years to allow it get in such a state?

The truth is, New Labour made a strategic decision a decade and a half ago that it needed to win the support of big business in order to demonstrate its credibility as a party of government.

It was once known as the Prawn Cocktail offensive - in the days when City executives still ate the stuff. Nowadays it would probably be called the Seared Scallops offensive instead.

Either way, the upshot was that when Labour came to power, it proceeded to apply a light-touch regulatory framework that was never likely to prevent a credit-fuelled boom getting out of hand.

To my mind, Mr Brown will now forever be haunted by the phrase which, during the early years of his Chancellorship, he made his own: “No return to Tory boom and bust.”

Back in the days when “Prudence” ruled the roost at No 11, he was as good as his word – but eventually, he allowed his vanity – or was it just ambition? – to get the better of him.

Like Anthony Barber and Nigel Lawson before him, Mr Brown found the temptation to bask in the reflected glory of economic good times too hard to resist.

Now, as Prime Minister, he is reaping the whirlwind – and how.