Skip's argument was that this option isn't really open to him in the modern media age, but I think today's Guardian interview in which Brown eschews the celebrity culture is a sure sign that he is going to try.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
The new Attlee?
Fellow leftie blogger Skipper and myself had an interesting debate over on his blog this week about whether Gordon Brown could actually make a virtue out of presenting himself as a sort of Clem Attlee type figure along the lines of "I know I'm a fairly dull sort of bloke compared to the last one, but judge me by what I do."
Skip's argument was that this option isn't really open to him in the modern media age, but I think today's Guardian interview in which Brown eschews the celebrity culture is a sure sign that he is going to try.
Skip's argument was that this option isn't really open to him in the modern media age, but I think today's Guardian interview in which Brown eschews the celebrity culture is a sure sign that he is going to try.
Where does the buck stop?
Is there a wider lesson to be learned from the debacle over whether the sailors captured by Iran should have been allowed to sell their stories? Who is really to blame for creating the kind of political culture in which this was initially seen as a good idea? This was the subject of my weekend column in the Journal and Derby Evening Telegraph today, and here it is in full.
****
The practice once quaintly known as "chequebook journalism" has nowadays become so commonplace that an entire cottage industry has grown up around it - one that goes by the name of Max Clifford Associates.
But twenty or so years ago, when the phrase was first coined, it was clearly understood to be a perjorative term for what was considered the dubious practice of buying newspaper stories for cash.
Back then, few imagined that a group of serving members of the Royal Navy who had just been engaged in a major international incident would one day be given official approval to sell their stories for six-figure sums.
But that was precisely what happened last weekend before the Government, realising it had a public relations disaster on its hands, executed a swift u-turn.
The Navy's initial response to the outcry appeared to be to try to maintain that the decision had been made internally, without wider MoD or ministerial involvement.
But it was obvious from the start that such a decision would have to have been taken, or at the very least approved, at a political level - or that if it wasn't, it should have been.
Belatedly, Defence Secretary Des Browne admitted he had indeed known of the decision, and insisted that the buck stopped with him.
At the same time, however, he maintained that although he had known of it and not put a stop to it, he had not approved the decision as such - a rather hair-splitting distinction even by New Labour standards.
Mr Browne has been hitherto one of the Government's lesser-known figures, a somewhat faceless apparatchik whose rise through the ministerial ranks has been as stealthy as it has been steady.
His elevation to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury after the 2005 election was the subject of a minor Whitehall controversy.
The post had apparently been earmarked by Tony Blair for the former Home Office minister John Denham, who resigned over the Iraq War with Robin Cook in 2003.
But Gordon Brown, who has always insisted on the right to appoint his own deputies, had already promised the job to his pal Des, and not for the first time, Mr Blair fought shy of a confrontation with his Chancellor.
In the event, he proved just the sort of middle-ranking minister Mr Blair likes - competent, low-key, and seemingly adept in keeping himself out of trouble.
He was duly rewarded with what seemed to some to be a startling promotion to Defence Secretary last May when Charles Clarke was sacked and the much-travelled John Reid moved to take up his current berth at the Home Office.
Again, Mr Browne proved the doubters wrong, and his quiet effectiveness in a difficult role had him spoken of a few weeks back as a possible Chancellor in a Gordon Brown government.
But as if to prove the old truism that everyone eventually rises to the level of their own incompetence, Mr Browne came back down to earth last week with a bump - and now his very survival as a minister is in question.
Much will now depend on his statement to the House of Commons on Monday, but the damage has already been done by Mr Browne's confused accounts of the affair.
His initial defence was that he was "not content" with the decision, but that he believed he had no choice under the rules but to acquiesce in it.
But given that any remotely competent lobby hack would know that all interviews with service personnel have to be cleared by the MoD press office, this is scarcely convincing.
And Mr Browne's case has not been helped by yesterday's revelation that the Press Complaints Commission had offered to help the MoD deal with the problem, but been rebuffed.
Aside from the Defence Secretary's plight, the whole episode of the 15 sailors' detention and subsequent release has not been a happy one for the Government.
Even prior to their release, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett had faced criticism for her apparently rather weak response, branding Iran's actions as merely "unacceptable" as opposed to the more trenchant language some might have favoured.
The release itself was a public relations triumph for Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, whose mixture of demagogic charm and political extremism makes him quite possibly the most dangerous man on the planet.
In the wider context of the diplomatic effort to prevent the Iranian president acquiring nuclear weapons, the affair seems to have had no impact at all.
In the final analysis, is this what Harold Macmillan might have called a little local difficulty, or is there a wider political lesson in it all?
Well, the obvious conclusion is that when things start to go wrong for a government, as they did for Mr Blair's long ago, you eventually reach the point where absolutely nothing goes right.
The idea, floated in the immediate aftermath that the release, that it would provide Mr Blair and Labour with a boost in the run-up to the local election campaign has proved risible.
Scotland and the SNP threat seems to have become the focus of the Government's worries on that score, and it is ironic that Mr Blair, who once dismissed the Scottish media as a bunch of unreconstructed self-abusers, is having to spend the dying days of his premiership there.
If there is a deeper lesson, though, it is surely to do with the media culture that New Labour has by turns encouraged and fed-off during its decade in power.
Only an administration which hijacked the death of a Princess to make itself look good and which thought 9/11 was a good day to bury bad news would think that allowing Navy personnel to sell their stories was a good idea.
It is all very well Mr Blair saying with the benefit of hindsight that it wasn't such a great idea after all, but in a political culture which views the media as an extension of Whitehall, it is scarcely surprising that such things happen.
It was Mr Blair and his sidekicks who created that culture. And if the buck stops anywhere, it is there.
****
The practice once quaintly known as "chequebook journalism" has nowadays become so commonplace that an entire cottage industry has grown up around it - one that goes by the name of Max Clifford Associates.
But twenty or so years ago, when the phrase was first coined, it was clearly understood to be a perjorative term for what was considered the dubious practice of buying newspaper stories for cash.
Back then, few imagined that a group of serving members of the Royal Navy who had just been engaged in a major international incident would one day be given official approval to sell their stories for six-figure sums.
But that was precisely what happened last weekend before the Government, realising it had a public relations disaster on its hands, executed a swift u-turn.
The Navy's initial response to the outcry appeared to be to try to maintain that the decision had been made internally, without wider MoD or ministerial involvement.
But it was obvious from the start that such a decision would have to have been taken, or at the very least approved, at a political level - or that if it wasn't, it should have been.
Belatedly, Defence Secretary Des Browne admitted he had indeed known of the decision, and insisted that the buck stopped with him.
At the same time, however, he maintained that although he had known of it and not put a stop to it, he had not approved the decision as such - a rather hair-splitting distinction even by New Labour standards.
Mr Browne has been hitherto one of the Government's lesser-known figures, a somewhat faceless apparatchik whose rise through the ministerial ranks has been as stealthy as it has been steady.
His elevation to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury after the 2005 election was the subject of a minor Whitehall controversy.
The post had apparently been earmarked by Tony Blair for the former Home Office minister John Denham, who resigned over the Iraq War with Robin Cook in 2003.
But Gordon Brown, who has always insisted on the right to appoint his own deputies, had already promised the job to his pal Des, and not for the first time, Mr Blair fought shy of a confrontation with his Chancellor.
In the event, he proved just the sort of middle-ranking minister Mr Blair likes - competent, low-key, and seemingly adept in keeping himself out of trouble.
He was duly rewarded with what seemed to some to be a startling promotion to Defence Secretary last May when Charles Clarke was sacked and the much-travelled John Reid moved to take up his current berth at the Home Office.
Again, Mr Browne proved the doubters wrong, and his quiet effectiveness in a difficult role had him spoken of a few weeks back as a possible Chancellor in a Gordon Brown government.
But as if to prove the old truism that everyone eventually rises to the level of their own incompetence, Mr Browne came back down to earth last week with a bump - and now his very survival as a minister is in question.
Much will now depend on his statement to the House of Commons on Monday, but the damage has already been done by Mr Browne's confused accounts of the affair.
His initial defence was that he was "not content" with the decision, but that he believed he had no choice under the rules but to acquiesce in it.
But given that any remotely competent lobby hack would know that all interviews with service personnel have to be cleared by the MoD press office, this is scarcely convincing.
And Mr Browne's case has not been helped by yesterday's revelation that the Press Complaints Commission had offered to help the MoD deal with the problem, but been rebuffed.
Aside from the Defence Secretary's plight, the whole episode of the 15 sailors' detention and subsequent release has not been a happy one for the Government.
Even prior to their release, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett had faced criticism for her apparently rather weak response, branding Iran's actions as merely "unacceptable" as opposed to the more trenchant language some might have favoured.
The release itself was a public relations triumph for Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, whose mixture of demagogic charm and political extremism makes him quite possibly the most dangerous man on the planet.
In the wider context of the diplomatic effort to prevent the Iranian president acquiring nuclear weapons, the affair seems to have had no impact at all.
In the final analysis, is this what Harold Macmillan might have called a little local difficulty, or is there a wider political lesson in it all?
Well, the obvious conclusion is that when things start to go wrong for a government, as they did for Mr Blair's long ago, you eventually reach the point where absolutely nothing goes right.
The idea, floated in the immediate aftermath that the release, that it would provide Mr Blair and Labour with a boost in the run-up to the local election campaign has proved risible.
Scotland and the SNP threat seems to have become the focus of the Government's worries on that score, and it is ironic that Mr Blair, who once dismissed the Scottish media as a bunch of unreconstructed self-abusers, is having to spend the dying days of his premiership there.
If there is a deeper lesson, though, it is surely to do with the media culture that New Labour has by turns encouraged and fed-off during its decade in power.
Only an administration which hijacked the death of a Princess to make itself look good and which thought 9/11 was a good day to bury bad news would think that allowing Navy personnel to sell their stories was a good idea.
It is all very well Mr Blair saying with the benefit of hindsight that it wasn't such a great idea after all, but in a political culture which views the media as an extension of Whitehall, it is scarcely surprising that such things happen.
It was Mr Blair and his sidekicks who created that culture. And if the buck stops anywhere, it is there.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
What will be Blair's legacy?
What will Tony Blair most be remembered for? Leading Labour to three election victories or Iraq? The minimum wage or cash for honours? Have your say in my current poll which can be accessed HERE or via the sidebar.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Will a Miliband bid bring Johnson in?
The man himself continues to deny it, but speculation about a David Miliband challenge to Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership continues unabated. Political betting guru Mike Smithson has today become the latest pundit to predict a Miliband candidacy, following last weekend's Sunday Telegraph tale that John Reid would be giving the Environment Secretary his backing.
But here's a question no-one seems to have asked as yet: what impact will a Miliband challenge have on other wannabe leaders who have thus far ruled themselves out of challenging Brown - ostensibly on the basis that he is the best candidate, but secretly because they don't think they can beat him?
Look at it this way. So long as Brown remains the only serious candidate, and overwhelmingly the most likely winner, there really is no great incentive for someone like Alan Johnson or Hilary Benn to challenge him. Far better to settle for the deputy leadership and (hopefully) a big job in the Brown Government.
But the moment that situation changes, and Brown faces a serious challenge which could theoretically result in him being defeated, then by my reckoning, all bets are off, and all earlier denials of interest so much hot air.
Such a scenario would present a particularly acute dilemma for the fifty-somethings Johnson, Benn and Peter Hain were the 40-year-old Miliband to be that challenger. The current consensus is that if Miliband does stand, he will at the very least establish himself as the heir-apparent, and could even win.
But that, of course, is the last thing Alan Johnson wants. He doesn't want the Labour leadership to "skip a generation" - at least not just yet. He wants to be deputy so that he can slip effortlessly into Gordon's shoes if the next election goes belly-up. The same may apply, to a slightly lesser extent, to Benn and Hain.
Hence my hunch is that if Miliband does stand against Gordon - and I'm still by no means convinced he will - he won't be the only one.
The "ultras" - Reid, Charles Clarke, even Blair himself - may all line up behind him, but he won't get a clear run. And at 40, with other, vastly more experienced people for the Labour Party to choose from, why on earth should he?
* Historical footnote. Similar calculations about whether a challenge to an established frontrunner could create a domino effect causing others to throw their hats into the ring also operated last time round, in the 1994 leadership contest.
One of the principal though lesser-known reasons Brown didn't stand on that occasion was that had he done so, it would have brought his old rival Robin Cook into the race.
With the support of the left and the likely second preference votes of Margaret Beckett and John Prescott, Cook would in all likelihood have come second, ahead of Brown, establishing himself as the de facto No 2 in the Labour pecking order.
People who knew Brown and Cook of old in their Edinburgh days have told me this was something Brown would have wanted even less than to see Blair leading the party.
But here's a question no-one seems to have asked as yet: what impact will a Miliband challenge have on other wannabe leaders who have thus far ruled themselves out of challenging Brown - ostensibly on the basis that he is the best candidate, but secretly because they don't think they can beat him?
Look at it this way. So long as Brown remains the only serious candidate, and overwhelmingly the most likely winner, there really is no great incentive for someone like Alan Johnson or Hilary Benn to challenge him. Far better to settle for the deputy leadership and (hopefully) a big job in the Brown Government.
But the moment that situation changes, and Brown faces a serious challenge which could theoretically result in him being defeated, then by my reckoning, all bets are off, and all earlier denials of interest so much hot air.
Such a scenario would present a particularly acute dilemma for the fifty-somethings Johnson, Benn and Peter Hain were the 40-year-old Miliband to be that challenger. The current consensus is that if Miliband does stand, he will at the very least establish himself as the heir-apparent, and could even win.
But that, of course, is the last thing Alan Johnson wants. He doesn't want the Labour leadership to "skip a generation" - at least not just yet. He wants to be deputy so that he can slip effortlessly into Gordon's shoes if the next election goes belly-up. The same may apply, to a slightly lesser extent, to Benn and Hain.
Hence my hunch is that if Miliband does stand against Gordon - and I'm still by no means convinced he will - he won't be the only one.
The "ultras" - Reid, Charles Clarke, even Blair himself - may all line up behind him, but he won't get a clear run. And at 40, with other, vastly more experienced people for the Labour Party to choose from, why on earth should he?
* Historical footnote. Similar calculations about whether a challenge to an established frontrunner could create a domino effect causing others to throw their hats into the ring also operated last time round, in the 1994 leadership contest.
One of the principal though lesser-known reasons Brown didn't stand on that occasion was that had he done so, it would have brought his old rival Robin Cook into the race.
With the support of the left and the likely second preference votes of Margaret Beckett and John Prescott, Cook would in all likelihood have come second, ahead of Brown, establishing himself as the de facto No 2 in the Labour pecking order.
People who knew Brown and Cook of old in their Edinburgh days have told me this was something Brown would have wanted even less than to see Blair leading the party.
Another one bites the dust...
The left-of-centre blogosphere will be a poorer place for the loss of The Daily. At its height, it was in my view one of the top two or three left-leaning blogs in the UK, and a regular source of interesting material on the Labour Deputy Leadership contest in particular.
Now it is no more, it would be nice to know who was actually behind it, as they were clearly Westminster insiders.
Now it is no more, it would be nice to know who was actually behind it, as they were clearly Westminster insiders.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Blair's place in history
Hats off to the Observer for its magnificent retrospective on the Blair Years on Sunday, the centrepiece of which was a magisterial essay from the essential chronicler of those years, Andrew Rawnsley.
Predictably for one who has always been seen as something of a New Labour boulevardier, Rawnsley's ultimate conclusion on the Blair premiership is a positive one.
"Some Prime Ministers merely preside over their time. Better Prime Ministers change their time. When Tony Blair's portrait goes up on the staircase wall at Number 10, he will leave office with a good claim to belong to that select company of Prime Ministers who change the future," he says.
To its credit, however, the Ob makes room for an alternative perspective from historian Dominic Sandbrook, who writes: "Truly great Prime Ministers challenge the status quo. They do not simply accept it. Blair seems destined to be remembered therefore as a consummately skilled political operator with brilliant tactical instincts but no radical or compelling long-term vision."
It probably won't surprise many people to know that I'm with Sandbrook on this. Any leftward shift in the political centre of gravity under Blair has been marginal when compared with the huge rightward shift under Thatcher which, by and large, her successor-but-one has accepted.
For me, he will go down in history as someone who had a historic opportunity to rebuild a social democratic political consensus in the UK, but who wasted his first term worrying about getting re-elected, his second on the disaster of Iraq, and his third on his preoccupation with his own legacy.
As Sandbrook writes: "Blair could have used his massive majorities to ram through radical changes in the health service, reorganise the railways, reconstitute the House of Lords, overhaul the pensions system, reform the electoral system, push for greater integration in the EU, even write a new constitution.
"If he had managed two or three - perfectly plausible in 10 years as Attlee could have told him, his domestic legacy would be uncontestable. But he never did."
Predictably for one who has always been seen as something of a New Labour boulevardier, Rawnsley's ultimate conclusion on the Blair premiership is a positive one.
"Some Prime Ministers merely preside over their time. Better Prime Ministers change their time. When Tony Blair's portrait goes up on the staircase wall at Number 10, he will leave office with a good claim to belong to that select company of Prime Ministers who change the future," he says.
To its credit, however, the Ob makes room for an alternative perspective from historian Dominic Sandbrook, who writes: "Truly great Prime Ministers challenge the status quo. They do not simply accept it. Blair seems destined to be remembered therefore as a consummately skilled political operator with brilliant tactical instincts but no radical or compelling long-term vision."
It probably won't surprise many people to know that I'm with Sandbrook on this. Any leftward shift in the political centre of gravity under Blair has been marginal when compared with the huge rightward shift under Thatcher which, by and large, her successor-but-one has accepted.
For me, he will go down in history as someone who had a historic opportunity to rebuild a social democratic political consensus in the UK, but who wasted his first term worrying about getting re-elected, his second on the disaster of Iraq, and his third on his preoccupation with his own legacy.
As Sandbrook writes: "Blair could have used his massive majorities to ram through radical changes in the health service, reorganise the railways, reconstitute the House of Lords, overhaul the pensions system, reform the electoral system, push for greater integration in the EU, even write a new constitution.
"If he had managed two or three - perfectly plausible in 10 years as Attlee could have told him, his domestic legacy would be uncontestable. But he never did."
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