On 6 June, all hell will break loose

"The Labour Party faces a shattering defeat at the next general election unless there is a fundamental change in the character, culture and direction of the government. That requires a change of leadership, for two reasons.

Firstly, because Mr Brown is simply too closely associated with the economic mismanagement of the past decade to be able to restore the party’s reputation for economic competence.

Secondly, because post-McBride, he cannot now escape responsibility for the corrosive culture of spin that has always characterised New Labour. Indeed, it is now clear that he has no more abolished spin than he has abolished boom and bust."

Here's the rest of today's Journal column.

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It is not so very long ago that the main yardstick against which many political commentators sought to judge would-be Prime Ministers or party leaders was whether they were “good on TV.”

Tony Blair certainly fell into that category, and for a decade, he successfully used his mastery of the arts of communication to mask his numerous other political shortcomings.

But if the last few weeks are anything to go by, we are now entering a new age in which Prime Minsters could rise and fall according to whether they are good on the internet.

Recent political events have led some pundits to pose the question: Could Gordon Brown be the first occupant of 10 Downing Street to be brought down by the worldwide web?

First, we had the Damian McBride smeargate affair, a scandal that for all the damage it has done the government, could only really have occurred in the digital age.

To start with, the smears in question were contained within emails. Secondly, they were brought to light not by the compliant national political media, which had an interest in keeping Mr McBride onside, but by an internet blogger, Guido Fawkes.

We then had the spectacle of Mr Brown making an ass of himself on YouTube, bopping around and smiling in the wrong places while announcing a clampdown on MPs expenses.

The fact that he was this week forced to withdraw the wretched proposals for fear of a humiliating defeat at the hands of his own backbenchers only served to rub salt into the self-inflicted wound.

Finally, 10 Downing Street was hoist by its own digital petard when it found itself hosting a 24,000-signature e-petition on its website calling on the Prime Minister to resign forthwith.

To add insult to injury, a rival petition calling on him to stay was signed by just 600 “visitors” including the likes of Phil McCavity and Orson Carte.

All of which left Mr Brown not just struggling to hold on to his authority, but – far worse for someone of his intellectual seriousness – struggling to avoid turning into a national joke.

As one commentator put it: “The internet hasn't yet made a politician in Britain. But the comic relief it affords bored office workers is helping to finish off poor Mr Brown.”

Of course, that was not all that the Prime Minister had to cope with this week. He also had to deal with a good old-fashioned backbench rebellion over plans to restrict the rights of Ghurkas to settle in the UK.

The obvious injustice of the government’s position presented an open goal to opposition party leaders Nick Clegg and David Cameron, whose alliance gave a foretaste of what might happen in a hung Parliament.

On top of everything else, we even had Mr Brown trying to leave the Commons Chamber after Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, forgetting that he had a statement to make on the war in Afghanistan.

How MPs fell about with laughter. How this most high-minded and sensitive of Prime Ministers must have inwardly squirmed.

So where does this leave Mr Brown now? Well, the Prime Minister’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed moreorless ever since he entered No 10, and in a sense we’ve been here before.

The problem is, there are some European elections coming up on 5 June which, in my view, are likely to prove a catastrophe for Labour.

Not only is the party up to 20 points behind in the polls, but as every Labour strategist knows, the party has always had a problem getting its vote out in elections where the government of the country is not at stake.

If the elections go as badly as everyone expects they will for Labour, it will create the political momentum for some sort of Cabinet-led putsch against the premier in the early weeks of June.

This is not the time to speculate on exactly how that might happen – there will be plenty of scope in future columns for me to do that.

But the underlying truth of the situation is that the Labour Party faces a shattering defeat at the next general election unless there is a fundamental change in the character, culture and direction of the government.

That requires a change of leadership, for two reasons. Firstly, because Mr Brown is simply too closely associated with the economic mismanagement of the past decade to be able to restore the party’s reputation for economic competence.

Secondly, because post-McBride, he cannot now escape responsibility for the corrosive culture of spin that has always characterised New Labour. Indeed, it is now clear that he has no more abolished spin than he has abolished boom and bust.

As someone who has always admired Mr Brown, and believed he would make a good Prime Minister, it gives me no great pleasure to write this. In fact I feel desperately sorry for him.

He should have had the chance to work for his vision of a fairer society at a time when the political wind was set fair for Labour. It was his tragedy to be denied that chance until the tide started going out on the party.

In the five weeks leading up to 5 June, we will by and large see the party rallying round him, Charles Clarke’s comments about being “ashamed to be a Labour MP” yesterday notwithstanding.

But once these elections are out of the way, expect all hell to break loose. And not just on internet blogs and YouTube.

A tale of two council leaders

Nearly two decades ago, Labour councillors David Bookbinder and Martin Doughty fought eachother for control of Derbyshire County Council. David had been leader for 11 often controversial years, but Martin thought there needed to be a change of direction. Eventually in 1992, David stepped down, and Martin went on to lead the council for nine years. I chronicled the absorbing struggle between these two genuinely gifted men in the Derby Evening Telegraph, of which I was then the political correspondent.

More recently, David and Martin have found themselves fighting battles of a different nature - against cancer. Sadly Martin, who had gone on to become a national figure as chair of the environment quango Natural England, and a knight of the realm to boot, succumbed to the disease in March at the tragically young age of 59. Most of his obituarists have understandably highlighted his passion for the environment, but back in the early 1990s I knew Martin on a more personal level. I can genuinely say that he was one of kindest men I have ever encountered in public life.

David meanwhile has suffered more than most from the ravages of the Big C, having lost both his wife and son to it before himself being diagnosed with the disease in 2004. In a recent interview with the Evening Telegraph, he tells how at one point he came close to taking his own life, but ultimately overcame the disease by dint of a bizarre mixture of remedies, his sheer will to live, and his unwavering belief in Manchester City Football Club.

I had many battles with David - he did not brook criticism as council leader and my approach to political journalism and his approach to politics were always likely to end in conflict - but I am genuinely pleased to hear that he has beaten the disease like the fighter he always was. I am incredibly sorry that Martin Doughty is no longer with us, but I wish David Bookbinder many more happy years on this earth. And I bet you thought you'd never hear me say that, Harry Barnes.

Ten more firsts

I thought the list of firsts which Iain Dale tagged me to fill-in on Monday left out one or two key rites-of-passage, so here are a few more. I won't tag Iain to do the same though....

First conscious memory of a news event
The Aberfan disaster, 1966.

First school
Elmgrove Infants, in Harrow.

First part in a school play
As "Wiz the Wizard" in the Elmgrove panto in 1968 or 69.

First time in hospital
December 1970, to have my tonsils out. It was at Charing Cross hospital - the old one that was right in the middle of Central London.

First pet
A goldfish called Highfield that was duly eaten by the cat.

First footballing hero
Peter Lorimer

First love
Her name also began with a J, but it wasn't the same one.

First drink in a pub
The Market Tavern, Hitchin, on Friday night after choir practice, sometime in 1977.

First time refused service in a pub
New Year's Eve 1983. I was well over-age by then, but two of the people I was with looked younger.

First run-in with the law
Sometime in the early 80s, for relieving myself outside St Mary's in the early hours of Christmas Day after attending Midnight Mass. I won't name the former Hitchin Boys' School head boy who was with me.

The way we were

The latest edition of Total Politics magazine focuses on the 1979 general election which was of course 30 years ago next month. I have contributed a tangentially connected "Where Are They Now?" piece about the former Labour MP Maureen Colquhoun who lost her seat at that election after having become Britain's first openly lesbian MP during the course of the previous parliament. It is not a story that reflects particularly well on British society at the time or more particularly on the Labour Party.

More memories of 1979 on this blog coming soon......

The twenty firsts meme

Mr Dale has tagged me to complete something called the "Twenty Firsts Meme" and since this seems like a chance to take a bit of a trip down memory lane, I'm happy to oblige.

First Job
Working behind the counter at the Barracuda fish and chip shop, Hitchin, on a Saturday. It was, as they say, a good way to meet people.

First Real Job
Trainee reporter on the Mansfield Chad 1986-8

First Role in Politics
Administration and Finance Officer of UCL Student Union 1983-84. The first, and only time, I have ever stood for elected office.

First Car
Fiat Uno.

First Record
The Pushbike Song by The Mixtures. Look, I was nine, okay?

First Football Match
Arsenal v Leicester City at Highbury, with my late uncle Eric, sometime in the 1972-73 season.

First Concert
Genesis at the NEC, 22 December 1981.

First Country Visited
Holland, on a school trip, in 1976. We had to go through Belgium to get there, of course.

First TV Appearance
Songs of Praise in 1978. St Mary's, Hitchin, was featured in the programme and I was in the choir.

First Political Speech
Probably in about 1981 or 1982 at the UCL students union, but I can't remember what it was about.

First Girlfriend/Boyfriend
Her name began with J, but I am certainly not going to be any more specific than that on a public website.

First Encounter with a Famous Person
We were having a family meal at a Hertfordshire restaurant some time in 1971/72 when Eric Morecambe came and sat at the next table.

First Brush With Death
Nearly drowning in the sea off the south coast of France while on holiday there in 1984.

First House/Flat Owned
It was in Sycamore Avenue, Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Notts. I moved in on what must have been the hottest day of 1987.

First Film Seen at a Cinema
The Jungle Book.

First Time on the Radio
Discussing the resignation of David Bookbinder as leader of Derbyshire County Council on GMR (Greater Manchester Radio) in 1992. I was the local government correspondent of the Derby Evening Telegraph at the time.

First Politician I Met
I think this was possibly Willie Whitelaw, during a campaign visit to Hitchin in the '79 general election.

First Book I Remember Reading
I don't remember!

First Visit to the London Palladium
Never been.

First Election
Other than the student union election referred to above, I have never played an active role in any election of any kind.

I am supposed to tag five others, and although I don't believe there should be any compulsion attached to this, I gently and respectfully suggest the names of: Barnacle Bill, Little Man in a Toque, Mars Hill, Party Political Animal - either one - and View from the North.

The election is now as good as lost

The Tory pundits, stuck in the battles of the 1980s and 90s, think the proposed 50p tax rate will lose Labour the next general election, but that's really not the issue now, and there are plenty of other good reasons why the Brown Government is almost certainly doomed. Here's today's Journal column.

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It is a measure of how much the recession has changed the nature of political debate in Britain that this year’s Budget headlines focused on the kind of issues which once left most people bemused.

Thirty years ago, the Budget was all about the price of booze, fags and petrol. More recently, the main interest has lain in whether rates of personal taxation were going up or down.

This year, though, people seem to care more about the public sector borrowing requirement and the ratio of debt to GDP than whether they will be a couple of hundred pounds a year better or worse off.

Is it down to our increasing economic literacy as a nation? Or simply a reflection of the astronomical sums of money being thrown around as Chancellor Alistair Darling tries to rescue the stricken economy?

The days when Gordon Brown as Chancellor concluded his Budget speeches with a rabbit-out-of-the-hat designed to send Labour backbenchers into paeans of ecstasy already seem very far away.

Those naïve enough to be looking to Mr Darling to produce such a rabbit on Wednesday will no doubt have been sorely disappointed.

For one, he does not have the room for manoeuvre needed in order to procure a last-minute crowd-pleaser, and in any case, he is not that sort of character.

Mr Darling’s low-key, calm authority is one of the few political assets Labour still possesses in this otherwise dire situation. He was surely right not to try to play the showman.

The nearest thing to a surprise in the Budget was the car scrappage scheme to give people an incentive to buy new motors and so help the car industry out of the doldrums.

No doubt it will encourage some to trade in their old bangers for shiny new models, thought the main obstacle to this remains the reluctance of the banks to provide credit.

Elsewhere, the £500m to kick-start stalled housing projects will be a welcome boost to the construction industry at a time when the market has gone flat, although there have been signs that it is reviving of its own accord.

Much of Wednesday’s package though – for instance raising statutory redundancy pay by £30 a week – seemed like pretty small potatoes in view of the extent of the crisis.

Much attention inevitably focused on the decision to introduce a 50p top rate of tax from next April, but I cannot believe this is the defining issue which many Conservative commentators have made it out to be.

The recent row over MPs’ expenses and the backlash against bankers’ bonuses seem to me to be indicative of a new mood in the country that is now ready to see the rich pay more.

The 50p top rate will affect just 1pc of the population, the great majority of whom are based in London and the South, while the amount of money raised - £3.3bn over the next three years – is hardly going to repay the national debt.

Freezing the top rate of tax at 40p doubtless helped win over the “aspirational” middle classes to Labour in 1997. But times change, and even policies as iconic as this one ultimately have to change with them.

The tax pledge was a direct response to the fact that Labour’s old tax-and-spend reputation had lost it the 1992 general election. But the 2010 election will be decided on very different issues.

What will almost certainly lose Labour that election is not its taxation policies but the dire state of the public finances, with borrowing levels for the next five years set to be £175bn, £173bn, £140bn, £118bn and £97bn.

As Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers Alliance put it: “This Budget commit taxpayers to a terrifying amount of debt that will burden ordinary families for decades to come.”

Labour can blame the global economy all they like. I suspect the response of voters will be: “It happened on your watch.”

Could it all still come right for Mr Brown and Labour? Could this Budget yet be the springboard for election victory in the unlikely event that Mr Darling is proved right in his forecasts and growth picks up again from the end of the year?

Well, if you had asked me that question a couple of months ago, I would have said yes – on the basis that it is “the economy, stupid” that usually determines election outcomes.

But then came the damaging row over Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s expenses and the truly appalling “smeargate” scandal involving former No 10 spin doctor Damian McBride.

As a result, this government has now begun to take on the same air of decay and moral degeneracy that characterised John Major’s Tories in the run-up to 1997.

To my mind, it is now inconceivable that the public will vote for another five years of this, even if the green shoots of recovery do start to appear by the time we go to the polls next spring.

When Mr Brown became Prime Minister, his admirers – of whom I was one – hoped he would restore trust in politics by ending the spin culture that will forever be associated with the Blair years.

But those who argued that Mr Brown was no different from his predecessor in this regard have been proved right, and the sense of optimism that surrounded the start of his premiership has long since faded.

It will take much more than this grimmest of Budgets to restore that sense of hope.