The right man wins

It's a pity, in a way, that there wasn't a contest. Had either the hard left or the uber-Blairite right succeeded in launching a challenge to Gordon Brown for the leadership of the Labour Party, they would have been rightly humiliated and Gordon's mandate for taking the party in a fresh, post-Blairite direction would have been strengthened.

But no matter, the important thing is that Gordon Brown will become Prime Minister on June 27, 2007 and for once in politics, the right man has finished first.

The speculation will continue about why first David Miliband, then John Reid, then finally Charles Clarke all ruled themselves out of the running, about why John Denham didn't spot the opportunity of a challenge from the sensible left, about why a trail of past would-be contenders from Stephen Byers to David Blunkett to Alan Milburn all fell one by one by the wayside.

But the single biggest reason was because Gordon was, all along, the best candidate - and his opponents knew it.

Over the past few months, there has been a concerted attempt on the right-wing blogosphere to portray Gordon Brown as both sinister and sleazy. This has gone way beyond the normal left-right party politicking, and has demonstrated at times an intensely personal dislike of Brown on the part of the ringleaders.

This has included accusations that Gordon abused his position by allowing a charity set up in memory of his close friend and mentor John Smith to use No 11 Downing Street, and various spurious attempts to link him into the cash-for-honours affair.

Had I joined in this witch-hunt, I have no doubt that my monthly traffic figures would now be soaring towards six figures. As it is, it is pretty clear from my stats that some people of a right-ish persuasion stopped reading my blog because they wanted to read bile about Gordon Brown, and didn't want to hear that he is a genuine guy with deeply-held values. So be it.

It's obvious why the Tory bloggers hate him so. They knew all along that he was the man who will show their leader David Cameron up to be the sub-Blair pretender that he is, and so set out to hobble him below the knees before he had even stood up against Cameron at the Despatch Box.

But if Brown's triumph is a victory against these politically-motivated bloggers, it is also a victory against a mainstream media which seemed determined to provoke a challenge for its own savage amusement.

Improbably led by the Labour-supporting Guardian and its Sunday stablemate the Observer, certain newspapers set out over a number of weeks to create the conditions in which a Cabinet-level challenge became seen as inevitable.

The intention was that, in the days following Blair's resignation announcement, the clamour would reach such a fever-pitch that some opportunist somewhere would be persuaded to dance to the media's tune. Indeed I myself fully expected that this would be the case.

As things turned out, it seems I both under-estimated the good sense of Brown's would-be opponents, and over-estimated the power of my former profession. And for that, I am grateful.

So who's Gordon supporting, then?

For a long time I have believed that Jon Cruddas might be the secret Gordon Brown candidate in the Labour deputy leadership election, mainly because he doesn't want to be DPM and Gordon doesn't really want one. Analysis of the nominations, however, strongly suggests that Harriet Harman is the favoured one.

Although Brownite blogging MP Tom Watson is indeed supporting Cruddas, the nomination list for Harperson looks like a roll-call of Brown's inner circle.

Key lieutenants of El Gordo plumping for Mrs Dromey include: Douglas Alexander, Nick Brown, Tom Clarke, Yvette Cooper, Alistair Darling, Nigel Griffiths, Geoff Hoon, Kevan Jones, Ed Miliband and Michael Wills.

Watson aside, the only ones among the Chancellor's intimates standing aloof from the Harman campaign are Ed Balls, who plumps for Alan Johnson, John Healey, who goes for Hilary Benn, and Doug Henderson, who is yet to nominate.

Continued May 17. Following on from the above, I supopose that if it is the case that Gordon is backing Harriet the obvious question is why? If he thinks that she is the candidate to help Labour reach the parts of the electorate that he himself can't reach, I fear he is much mistaken.

For once, I agree with Tony Blair in his assessment of Harman's claims to represent the voice of Middle England. "Middle England? Middle Islington maybe."

In fact Harriet Harman is regarded by much of Middle England as a champagne socialist - a breed they despise with far more venom than straightforward cloth-capped lefties like John Prescott. I may not like her boyfriend much, but Fiona Millar is spot-on with this piece on CiF today.

As it is, I don't think the unofficial "endorsement" of the Brownite camp is likely to be helpful to HH. Having been deprived of a contest for the leadership, I think Labour members are slightly in the mood to be counter-suggestible where the deputy leadership is concerned.

It's political balance that matters

With the Labour Deputy Leadership Contest now coming to the boil, there has been much talk over the last 24 hours of who will make the best "partner" for Gordon Brown. The clear view of Alan Johnson is that he would because he comes from a working-class background in London as opposed to Gordon's middle-class Scottish upbringing.

The clear analogy being drawn here is with the Tony Blair-John Prescott partnership, with Prescott himself now publicly backing his fellow Hull MP's bid to succeed him.

But Johnson and Co are missing the point. Blair-Prescott was not the successful partnership that it was on account of the fact that Prezza is "working class." It is because, politically, Prescott represented a different strand of the Labour movement from Blair, enabling the party's traditional supporters to feel as if they had a voice at the top table, even if this wasn't always necessarily the case.

Similarly, Harriet Harman is wrong to stress, as she has done on a number of occasions, the importance of gender-balance in the selection of a leadership team. It's certainly important that women are well-represented in Gordon's Cabinet - and with Yvette Cooper and Caroline Flint set for big promotions, they will be - but you don't have to have a female deputy leader to appeal to women voters.

No, it's political balance that counts, which is why I am of the view that neither Harman, nor Johnson, nor Hilary Benn would necessarily be the best candidates on offer. All of them are virtually ideologically indistinguishable from Gordon, and none of them can genuinely claim to have carved out a distinctive policy agenda.

The Labour Party could, if it wanted to, achieve a sort of "balance" by electing the uber-Blairite candidate, Hazel Blears, but that would merely give it a balance between New Labour's own tribal factions, ignoring the large swathe of party members who see themselves as neither New Labour nor Old Labour, just Labour.

If the party is looking for a more meaningful balance between the New Labour "right" and what I call the "sensible left," then the two candidates who would offer the best counterpoint to Gordon are Peter Hain and Jon Cruddas.

Hain looks certain to get on the ballot paper, Cruddas slightly less so, but whichever of them eventually emerges as the standard bearer of the disenfranchised mainstream left in this election is the one who will get my support.

Red Dawngate

I make no comment on whether this Mail on Sunday story alleging that John Reid attempted to have sex with "Red Dawn" Primarolo during his drinking days was behind his decision not to contest the Labour leadership, other than to say that we've all done silly things while under the influence, and that if the Brown camp have been puttting this sort of stuff about, it's no worse than what the Blair camp was putting round about "gay" Gordon in '94.

But it has left me wondering whether MoS muck-raker story-getter extraordinaire Simon Walters might have further instalments in store on why neither Alan Milburn nor Charlie No Trousers Clarke stood for the leadership either, despite confident predictions in the latter case that a challenge would indeed be launched.

Blair - a preliminary verdict

Some of you thought I was being a bit flippant, or even peevish, in my rather light-hearted run-through of Tony Blair's "achievements" the other day. Well, a rather more considered asssessment appears in my column in today's Newcastle Journal and I reproduce it in full here.

***

And so, the deed is finally done. Tony Blair has announced his resignation as Labour leader and on June 27, when he ceases to be Prime Minister, an era in British politics will draw to a close.

As I wrote last week, it's come about four years too late, but let's not quibble about the minor details - the important thing for the Labour Party and the country is that he's going.

"I've been prime minister of this country for just over 10 years. I think that's long enough for me, but more especially for the country," he told his constituents at Trimdon Labour Club in County Durham.

And in what might have been a moment of self-knowledge he added: "Sometimes, the only way you conquer the pull of power is to set it down."

Earlier this year, Mr Blair told the BBC that he would not "beg for his character in front of anyone." Well, it sounded very much to me like he was begging for it on Thursday.

The gist of his farewell message to the nation seemed to be that, even though he might have got some things wrong, he wanted us to believe that he always acted out of the best of motives.

It wasn't one of his greatest efforts, to tell the truth. But it did, however, have the merit of humility, of acknowledging that his premiership had fallen short of expectations.

"The visions are painted in the colours of the rainbow and the reality is sketched in the duller tones of black and white and grey," he said. It's as good a comment on the Blair years as any.

The sense of disappointment, of lost hopes and unfulfilled promise that has accompanied the Blair era is felt by different people in different ways.

For many, it will be the extent to which he allowed his mission to reform the public services to become diverted by the "war on terror," culminating in the terrible morass of Iraq.

For others, it will be his failure to grasp the historic opportunity of his 1997 landslide to fashion a political realignment on the centre-left, or a new relationship with Europe.

For me, it will always be his failure, as the first Labour Prime Minister in 18 years, to heal the social and economic divisions of Thatcherism, and to have presided instead over an increase in inequality.

So what will be Mr Blair's lasting legacy? Well, the case against him is well known, and has been articulated in a fair amount of detail in this column down the years.

In a nutshell, it can be summed up in two words, Iraq and spin - two words that, taken together, have deepened the loss of public trust in politics that has occurred over the past decade.

But what of the case for him? Well, this rests primarily in my view on the extent to which he succeeded in bringing about what has been termed "social justice by stealth."

Mr Blair's admirers argue that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, he was actually responsible for a huge redistribution of wealth to the less well-off that has made a significant and lasting impact on society.

Now admittedly, there is something in this. Much higher benefits allied to new tax credits to the low paid mean around 600,000 fewer children are now below what the EU defines as the "poverty line."

But the very fact that Mr Blair felt unable to boast about this considerable achievement for fear of alienating Middle England demonstrates that he did not, in the end, alter the political consensus.

In any case, the argument that the Blair government was responsible for making a major dent in poverty also depends on whether you define poverty in absolute or relative terms.

Under the former definition, it is undeniably true that most people are much better off under New Labour. But at the same time, it is also undeniably the case that the gap between rich and poor was widened.

Nowhere, of course, is this dichotomy more pronounced than in the North-East. It would be churlish to deny that the region has experienced a major growth in prosperity over recent years.

But with other regions forging ahead at an even faster rate, the economic divide between North and South has widened on most measures during the Blair decade.

His government has been, at best, disinclined to address the North-South gap and, at worst it has actively pursued policies that have exacerbated it, such as the huge transport infrastructure investment in London and the South-East.

And his attempts at institutional reform in the region were a disaster, with the North-East Assembly referendum going down as one of the great debacles of his premiership.

So what next? Well, a curiosity of the week's political events was that Mr Blair did not even manage to stage the most sensational resignation. That distinction belonged to John Reid.

Was the Home Secretary's decision not to challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership simply an acknowledgement that he is unbeatable? Well, probably.

Mr Blair's generous endorsement of the Chancellor's bid to succeed him yesterday masks the fact that, for months, the Blairites have tried in vain to find an alternative contender.

Ultimately they were defeated by two things - the arithmetic of Labour's electoral college, and South Shields MP David Miliband's reluctance to be their standard-bearer.

So in the end, Mr Blair was telling the truth in his conference speech last autumn when he said he wanted to "heal" the party's wounds to build a platform for election victory.

He deserves credit for that, and for saving Labour, at the last, from a civil war that would certainly have lost it that election.

As the Prime Minister told us on Thursday: "Believe one thing, if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country."

For once, in staging the orderly transition that has been so long awaited, he has.

Howard nails the real culprit

Probably only political obsessives managed to stick with yesterday's extended edition of Newsnight to the bitter end, but for those that did, there was a real treat in store.

Jeremy Paxman was chairing a studio discussion featuring Howard, Polly Toynbee, Charles Kennedy, Alan Milburn, David Hare and Alastair Campbell. Towards the end, the talk turned to Tony Blair's style of government and the impact of spin and sleaze.

Howard recalled that in the days when the young Tony Blair used to shadow him at Employment and the Home Office, he found him at all times to be absolutely straight and honest.

Then, looking across at Campbell, he declared: "I believe the man sitting there is who's responsible for what changed." Campbell had no response to it other than to accuse Howard of being a sore loser.

Howard's right, of course. Blair must bear the final responsibility as the man who employed him, but it was Campbell whose bullying of journalists and civil servants in the cause of news management did more than anything else to demean our political culture during the Blair years.

And of course, it was Campbell who wanted to get Dr David Kelly's name out in the open in order to "fuck Gilligan," part of the chain of events that ultimately destroyed the public's trust in Mr Blair.

The Guardian's Will Woodward has written a piece in today's Blair Resignation Supplement (not online as far as I can see) the gist of which is that Tony Blair would not have been the same force without Alastair Campbell.

Will is a nice guy who has already gone far in the Lobby and will go further, but he's wrong on this one. Without the baleful influence of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair might have been a great Prime Minister.

Update: The Newsnight clip is now on YouTube, courtesy of Chicken Yoghurt.