A prophecy fulfilled

A month into the new year, the 2008 media narrative of the Second Brown Bounce now seems a very distant memory. Here's today's Journal column.

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Four weeks ago, in my annual preview of the political year ahead, I commented that the art of political forecasting was now becoming a good deal harder than predicting the outcomes of sporting contests.

My point was that the sheer unpredictability of the UK political scene during 2008 – the year of bank nationalisation and the Second Brown Bounce – made sports punditry a doddle by comparison.

But a month into the New Year, I seem to have proved myself wrong. The sporting prediction I made, that Chelsea would regain the premiership title, is already looking pretty threadbare.

By contrast, it seems I was spot on with my political forecasting – that the recession would get much, much worse – and that the political standing of Gordon Brown and Labour would again start to deteriorate.

It didn’t take long, did it? Once again, the Tories are now enjoying the kind of double-digit lead in the opinion polls that would see David Cameron on course for a sizeable Commons majority.

The mood in the country appears to have turned, perhaps decisively. An electorate which a few months back appeared to be impressed with Gordon Brown’s handling of the economic crisis now seems angry and looking around for someone to blame.

I myself noticed the atmosphere change around the back end of November, perhaps at the point at which Woolworths went into administration, to be followed by a series of other High Street names.

Up until then, it had been possible to believe that the crisis really was just about banks refusing to lend to eachother. Over the past two months, though, the impact in the “real economy” has finally been felt – with a vengeance.

Two weeks ago, it was 1,200 jobs lost at Nissan in Sunderland. This week it was 2,500 at steelmaker Corus. Once again the very survival of the UK’s manufacturing base is under threat.

And it’s not just manufacturing of course. It is very obvious to anyone working in a commercial environment that we are facing unprecedentedly difficult times - not least in the newspaper industry.

So the Prime Minister is once again back in a very bad place, and for the Cabinet, as well as for the rest of us, these are anxious days indeed.

As one of the more perceptive Westminster observers wrote this week: “Nerves are beginning to fray. Ministers watch the polls and the economy with equal fascination. The debate about the future of the party and its leadership is under way.”

And if the mood in the country has changed, so has the Prime Minister’s. Once again, the pressure seems to be starting to get to him.

The self-confident, swaggering Gordon of last autumn, when he was busy saving the world from economic catastrophe, has gone, and the old, anxious, workaholic Gordon has returned.

Some say that the possibility of a parliamentary defeat in the vote over the Heathrow third runway this week - a potentially serious blow but hardly terminal, if you’ll excuse the pun - had Mr Brown close to tears.

It seems it was less the issue itself, more the prospect of being seen to be losing his grip that was exercising the Prime Minister.

What has been particularly damaging for Mr Brown over the past month is that, increasingly, independent economic assessments of the UK’s position seem at odds with his own.

Since the start of the crisis, the Prime Minister’s defence has been twofold. Firstly, that it wasn’t my fault, guv. Secondly, that Britain was better placed to weather the coming storm than any other major economy.

The International Monetary Fund begs to differ, however, arguing this week that the slump’s impact will be worse in the coming year in Britain than in the US, Japan, Spain, Italy, France, Canada and Germany.

Even if they turn about to be wrong, it’s a gift to the opposition parties who will no doubt use it repeatedly to undermine the Prime Minister’s boasts about his management of the economy over the past 12 years.

And there is of course one boast in particular will haunt Mr Brown to the end of his days – the claim, repeated as recently as his 2007 Budget Speech, to have abolished “boom and bust.”

The Radio Four presenter Evan Davis gave a fairly good impersonation of his BBC colleague Jeremy Paxman when asking him about it on the Today Programme this week.

Whereas Paxman famously asked Michael Howard 14 times whether he had threatened to overrule the director of the prison service, Davis only managed to ask Brown seven times whether he now accepted that boom had indeed followed bust.

But the effect was the same – a politician pointlessly trying to dodge a journalist’s question when he has already damned himself out of his own, hubristic mouth.

In that New Year column, I made reference to the possibility that Mr Brown may not, in the end, lead his party into the next general election.

This might have seemed like a foolhardy thing to say at the time, given that the dominant 2008 media narrative had been of Mr Brown’s amazing comeback from the ranks of the political walking dead following the election-that-never-was debacle of autumn 2007.

But just as he never succeeded in abolishing boom and bust, I never seriously believed he had succeeded in abolishing the most fundamental law of politics – that governments who preside over economic catastrophe invariably end up facing electoral oblivion.

Now that this fundamental law is starting to reassert itself, it is only a matter of time before the plotting begins again.

The Louse of Whores

Like the UK Daily Pundit,I am snowed under at the moment - in my case trying to deal with the impact of the recession on the regional press industry - so blogging will continue to be light, though not non-existent, over the next few weeks.

I wish I had had the chance to post this week on the latest in the long and growing line of British political corruption scandals, and what it ought to tell us about the current method of choosing members of the Second Chamber, but you'll have to make do with this cartoon from Slob instead. Visitors of an overly squeamish disposition should perhaps look away now.

An old debate rears its head again

Today's call by the House of Lords' Communications Committee for the introduction of televised lobby briefings inevitably gave me a certain sense of deja vu. They were talking about this back in 2004 when I left the Lobby and, given the usual pace at which things tended to change in that august place, I'm not entirely surprised to find they are still talking about it now.

I suppose that now I am a website editor I ought to be instinctively in favour of the committee's proposal for video-streaming the briefings on the No10 site, but the regional press print journalist in me still suspects that it would be bad news for the sector.

To me, what was so remarkable about the lobby briefings was how incredibly democratic they were, in the sense that a regional political reporter like myself had as much opportunity to ask a question as the political editor of the BBC. That would no longer be the case if they were televised, as the broadcasters would invariably fight to get their questions in first for the requisite news footage.

I was surprised to find that my written contribution to the original Phillis Review on government comunications in 2003 in which this issue was also raised is still available online at the Cabinet Office archive. You can read it in full HERE.

The day Downing Street "lost it"

Most journalists have a favourite story, and most people who knew me in my Lobby days would probably assume mine was the infamous Eddie George gaffe - in which the then Bank of England Governor told me that lost North-East jobs were an acceptable price to pay to curb inflation in London and the South.

But they would be wrong. The story I enjoyed the most was actually written a year earlier in October 1997 and concerned the then Labour Cabinet Minister and South Shields MP, Dr David Clark.

A Downing Street press officer, perhaps mistaking me for someone who could be relied on to unthinkingly recycle the New Labour spin, told me that Dr Clark had "lost it" and would shortly be sacked in a reshuffle. We duly turned the story round, reporting that far from having "lost it," Clark was actually the victim of a smear campaign, and splashed it all over the front page.

But what was No 10 up to, exactly? You can read the full story in my "Where Are They Now" column this month's edition of Total Politics which focuses on the Good Doctor's short but fascinating Cabinet career.

Charisma alone is not enough

Can Barack Obama restore the American public's faith in politics? And can David Cameron restore the British public's faith in the Tory Party? Here's today's Journal column.

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Politicians are ultimately frail vessels for the hopes they are meant to bear. They are only human, yet sometimes we invest them with such superhuman qualities as to practically invite disappointment.

Tony Blair certainly fell into that category. When he took over as Prime Minister in May 1997 after a dismal period of Tory misrule, the sense of a new beginning in the country was almost palpable.

As the man himself memorably said on that bright morning at London’s Royal Festival Hall as Labour activists gathered to celebrate their victory: “A new dawn has broken, has it not?”

Nearly twelve years on, another politician finds himself in a similar position. Barack Obama this week took over from quite possibly the worst president in 200 years of American history, and once again a country is filled with new hope and optimism.

As George W. Bush leaves office after eight tumultuous years, it is interesting to reflect on the part he played in souring the British public’s relationship with Mr Blair.

We will, of course, never know what might have happened had Mr Bush not decided to go to war with Iraq, and Britain not been dragged into the imbroglio, but the suspicion persists that the course of the Blair premiership would have been rather different.

As the late Robin Cook noted in his resignation speech in the Commons in March 2003, had the hanging chads in Florida fallen the other way and Al Gore become president instead, the whole debacle would probably never have happened.

Would Mr Blair still be Prime Minister even now? It will, I suspect, go down as one of the great modern political counterfactuals, alongside "What would have happened if John Smith had lived?"

Our experiences over the past decade have perhaps caused us to distrust “charisma” as a political commodity. Certainly we seem as a nation to be less easily persuaded by Tory leader David Cameron’s easy charm than we were by Mr Blair’s in the mid-1990s.

American voters, though, have always been more star-struck, even though they have suffered far deeper and more bitter disillusionments over the past 40 years than we have on this side of the pond.

Yet despite the national humiliation of the Watergate scandal and the sheer, downright sleaziness of the Monica Lewinsky affair, they have never quite given up on their search for someone capable of stepping into the shoes of their lost leader, John F. Kennedy.

Mr Obama is the kind of politician who has it in him to fill that void in the American psyche, to renew their faith in politics and political leadership, but of course, the corollary of that is he also has it in him to further deepen that disillusionment – as Mr Blair ultimately did in the UK.

President Obama has at least made a positive start. The promised dismantling of Guantanamo Bay has already begun, and moves are already under way to bring an end to the Iraq adventure.

But if anything, the new leader of the western world seems to be intent on playing down those great expectations that surround him.

The inauguration speech did not last an hour and a half. It contained little soaring rhetoric. And there were no compelling soundbites of the magnitude of "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Instead, the watchword was "responsibility" as Mr Obama sought to present himself perhaps less in the mould of JFK and more in the mould of Gordon Brown - less a Hollywood-style superstar and more a “serious man for serious times."

Indeed, Mr Obama’s use of the phrase “a new era of responsibility” on Tuesday carried uncanny echoes of our own Prime Minister’s attacks on “the age of irresponsibility.”

While as a soundbite, this is not quite in the league of “we have nothing to fear but fear itself,” it will probably go down as the defining message of Mr Obama’s inaugural address.

Back home, though, the other big political story of the week was the return of Ken Clarke to the Tory frontbench as Shadow Business Secretary after nearly 12 years in the wilderness.

This too was in part a consequence of the economic downturn, but in the broader political picture, it is a recognition of the fact that the Tories have not been making the best use of their available talents.

Much has already been written about the head-to-head between Mr Clarke and Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, two politicians as different as chalk and cheese.

With Mr Clarke, what you see is by and large what you get, but the former Hartlepool MP has always been a much more elusive figure, ultimately more at home operating in the shadows than in front of the camera.

They do, however, have two very important things in common. They are both very divisive figures within their respective parties, and they are both wildly pro-European.

It will doubtless be a fascinating contest, but I personally think the 68-year-old former Chancellor has sold himself short. He should be back as Shadow Chancellor, flaying Labour for its squandering of the golden economic legacy he left them in 1997.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Mr Clarke’s return is what it says about Mr Cameron.

His undoubted charisma won him the party leadership after he wowed the 2005 conference with his oratory, and it has won him a generally positive public image, but it has not been enough to create that sense of inevitability behind a Tory election victory that Mr Blair enjoyed in the mid-90s.

The return of Mr Clarke has given the Cameron team a much-needed injection of experience and gravitas at a time when it has been struggling to establish itself as a government-in-waiting.

Like Mr Obama, perhaps Mr Cameron too is recognising that charisma alone is not enough.

Second comings