Saturday, May 10, 2008

Sands of time running out for Gordon

How much longer has Gordon Brown got to turn things around for Labour? And if he fails, who might replace him? Here's my column from today's Newcastle Journal.

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Last Saturday, I wrote in this column that despite Labour’s abysmal performance in the local election, I did not detect any appetite in the party for another change of leadership.

For now, I am sticking to that. In spite of Labour’s current dreadful plight, the party as a whole remains overwhelmingly loyal to Gordon Brown and desperately wants to see him succeed.

At the same time, however, there is a growing awareness that things cannot go on like this indefinitely, and that there may come a point where a change has, however reluctantly, to be made.

Mr Brown, in other words, is now on notice. Unless he can demonstrate that he is still the one to turn things around, the pressure on him to do the decent thing will become insurmountable.

The past week has brought no respite for the government. Last Thursday’s local election carnage was followed by Boris Johnson’s totemic victory over Ken Livingstone in London in the early hours of Saturday morning.

More damaging still was Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander’s decision to back a referendum on Scottish independence, almost certainly without Mr Brown’s approval.

The potential longer-term consequences of that announcement are worthy of a column in itself, but the short-term impact was to make it look like the Prime Minister had lost control of his own party.

Yesterday, the polling organisation You Gov piled yet deeper humiliation on Mr Brown as its latest survey showed the Tories 26 points in front, with Labour on its lowest rating ever at 23pc.

Estimates vary as to how much time Mr Brown has left in which to turn the situation around. Some say a year, some say as little as three or four months.

My own take on the matter is that there will need to be evidence that the crisis has bottomed out and the situation begun to move back in Labour’s favour by the time of the autumn conferences.

Furthermore, by next May’s local elections, there will need to be proof that Labour is at least on the road to recovery, back within touching distance of the Tories in terms of overall share of the vote.

If neither of those things happen, I think it entirely plausible that Mr Brown will fall on his own sword. The one thing he has always been is a party man.
So who might take over? Well, the one consolation for Gordon in yesterday’s You Gov poll is that it showed that any other leader – including South Shields MP David Miliband – would do even worse.

This bears out my own view that this crisis is not primarily about personalities, but about Labour’s collective failure to articulate a new vision capable of re-enthusing the electorate.

It follows from what I have said thus far that in my view, replacing Mr Brown with another old-stager from the Cabinet would be a completely pointless exercise.

The name most mentioned in this regard is Jack Straw, but he would carry all of the baggage of having served in the Blair-Brown Cabinet since the start, as well having been Foreign Secretary at the time of the Iraq invasion.

Skipping a generation has a far greater potential appeal, and overwhelmingly the name on people’s lips in this context is Mr Miliband.

The other young hopefuls, James Purnell, Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband, fall into the next-leaders-but-one category, while Ed Balls would simply be Mr Brown without the gravitas.

The main advantage of having a leader from the thirty- and forty-something age-band is that it would indicate that the party was looking ahead and moving on from the now seemingly discredited Blair-Brown era.

That said, none of the “next generation” candidates are exactly over-endowed with charisma, and if they do have any fresh ideas, they have not exactly been much in evidence thus far.

What, then, about a backbench heavyweight - someone who could combine experience with the appearance of change, by virtue of not having been party to the debacle of the Brown premiership.

Of the obvious contenders, Charles Clarke has made too many foolish outbursts and hence too many enemies, while David Blunkett has made too many personal errors of judgement.

Potentially the most promising “change candidate” is Darlington MP Alan Milburn, whose still-youthful appearance belies his five years’ Cabinet experience.

More importantly, he alone among Labour’s big-hitters has demonstrated an appetite for thinking outside the box. Whether he actually wants the job is unclear, but in my view, this could be his time.

But while the election of Mr Milburn would represent a shift back towards a more “Blairite” agenda, another, riskier option would be to make a conscious shift to the left.

The man for that task would be Jon Cruddas, whose thoughtful campaign for the deputy leadership last year now appears prophetic in its attacks on the intellectual emptiness of New Labour.

There is also a case to be made for a woman, given that Mr Brown has been criticised for his inability to “empathise” with voters in the way that David Cameron appears to be able to do.

The difficulty is that none of the available women seem particularly empathetic. Indeed the likes of Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper are even more prone to New Labour-style hectoring than their male counterparts.

After reading this far, you might think that, with no single candidate entirely free from drawbacks, the party would be better off sticking with the devil they know.

But politics doesn’t really work like that. Unless Mr Brown can recover, there will come a point when Labour MPs start to take the view that it’s his neck on the line or theirs.

Some argue that no-one really wants the job any more, that it is too much of a poisoned chalice – but politics doesn’t work like that either, and there will be someone, somewhere prepared to grasp the opportunity.

All is not quite lost for Mr Brown. But he knows that the sands of time are now fast running out on him.

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Friday, May 09, 2008

Could Geoff Hoon or Tessa Jowell really be the next PM?

The weeks between the start of the summer Parliamentary recess in July and the party conference season in September have traditionally been known in the "silly season" in political and journalistic circles. With the MPs off on their holidays, it is a time of long, slow news days at Westminster, with the result that any small thing that happens tends to get rather blown out of proportion.

Perhaps the greatest silly season story of my time in the Lobby came in August 1997, when John Prescott's throwaway remark about naming a baby crab after Peter Mandelson made headlines the length and breadth of Fleet Street.

But if the past couple of days are anything to go by, the silly season has arrived early this year. Two of my favourite bloggers have come out with what can only be described as outlandish theories about the post-Brown Labour leadership.

Mike Smithson of PoliticalBetting.com is one of the most insightful political commentators in the country - inside and outside the MSM. Yet incredibly, he decided to devote an entire blog post yesterday to the idea that Tessa Jowell could become Prime Minister.

Now I do realise that the raison d'etre of PB.com is political betting, as it says on the tin, and that one aspect of this is the seeking-out of unlikely scenarios from which the site's aficionados can thereby profit at long odds, but even so....

Leaving aside the fact that Jowell is the absolute personification of nannny-knows-best New Labourism, has Mike totally forgotten about the David Mills-Silvio Berlusconi affair, which nearly brought about Jowell's resignation from the Blair Cabinet?

The Daily Pundit is a less serious blog. Indeed at times, I have openly wondered whether it is a spoof on the entire political punditry industry. Today, for instance, it carries a delightful story speculating whether Guto Harri will shortly replace Michael Cole as spokesman for Mohamed-al-Fayed.

If so, it would explain why the Pundit's current hot tip for Labour leader is Geoff "Buff" Hoon, although in his defence, there is at least a literary precedent for a Chief Whip becoming party leader, namely Francis Urquhart in House of Cards.

In a recent comment on this blog, the Pundit takes me to task for failing to include Hoon in my current poll on the Labour leadership, still being headed by Jack Straw.

In my reply, I own up to the fact that I myself once tipped Hoon to be Tony Blair's successor over a few pints with a couple of Labour researchers in Bellamy's, only to be laughed out of the room.

Well, you may say, it's all very well me dissing others' efforts to make sense of the current political crisis - who do I think should become Labour leader if Brown were to be forced out?

Tomorrow, in my weekly column which will be available on this blog, I will give my answer.

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Thursday, May 08, 2008

Local history site unearths oldest ever England team photo

Anyone who has heard the news today or read any of the nationals will be aware of the discovery of what is believed to be the oldest ever photograph of an England football team. It dates from 1876 and was taken in Glasgow on the day England played Scotland in what was only the fifth ever international football match.

What you may not be aware of - because none of the nationals actually mention it - is that this was actually a world exclusive for a Derbyshire local history site with which I am currently involved called You and Yesterday.

The picture was uploaded to the site last weekend by one of its regular contributors, Peter Seddon, who unearthed it during a search of old newspapers on microfilm at the Derby Local Studies Library.

To its credit, the FA website's write-up includes a link enabling users to click straight through to the picture on You and Yesterday. Readers of this blog can do the same by clicking HERE.

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