Great cricketing quotations of our time No 94

"Cricket civilizes people and creates good gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe. I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen."

Robert Mugabe

Should Brown sacrifice his Darling?

Nick Robinson posed an interesting question on the Today Programme this morning - for those who missed it, he has helpfully reproduced the entire script on his blog. But basically the gist of it was: should Gordon Brown sack Alistair Darling as Chancellor as part of a planned "autumn relaunch" of the government?

There will be those who will regard such a question as simply irrelevant, in that the plight of the Brown premiership is no so dire as to be beyond such rearranging of the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Others will argue that Mr Darling is scarcely to blame for the economic difficulties that have buffeted Labour moreorless ever since he took over the job. The Tories' line of attack would doubtless be that he is simply the "fall guy" for Mr Brown.

Both of these are fair points. But for me, the reason Mr Darling should be replaced is the same two reasons that he should never have got the job in the first place - one, because he is Scottish, two, because he is rather dull.

It was always going to be the case that, with Brown as premier, having another Scot in what is effectively the No 2 government role was going to be tricky. When that Scot has a reputation for being almost as dour as Brown himself, it was going to be doubly so.

It would have made a great deal more sense had Brown appointed David Miliband or Alan Johnson to the Treasury role as soon as he has taken over. A year on, they are probably now the two Labour ministers with the most popular appeal. If it is to give itself even a chance at the next election, the party must play to its strengths by promoting one of them - probably Miliband - to the Chancellorship.

Total Politics goes live

The Total Politics website is now live and my "Where are they now?" contribution can be found HERE.

As previously mentioned, this is the first of a regular series focusing on shooting stars of the political firmament - those who enjoyed a brief fifteen minutes of fame or notoriety before returning to obscurity. In issue No 1, I focus on Walter Sweeney, a former Tory MP best known for a delightful story involving a crunch Commons vote, a 22-stone government whip, and a toilet.

On the subject of Total Politics, I was interested to read this interview with the magazine's publisher, Iain Dale in yesterday's Observer, in particular this paragraph.

"I think blogs as a phenomenon are on a plateau at the moment," he says. "Readership is growing but I don't see any great innovation. I see the mainstream media organisations embracing blogging and doing it quite well, eclipsing them in some areas. I'm really disappointed there have not been five or six other people that have built a mass readership. There are only four blogs [Dale's own, plus PoliticalBetting, ConservativeHome and Guido Fawkes] that have done that, and there's a huge gap between the four of us and the next 10."

I don't for a minute doubt Iain's sincerity in saying this - he has often gone out of his way to promote other, smaller blogs that he thinks worthy of note, including this one - but it's a fact of economic life that once someone - or a group of people - establishes a market dominance, it becomes much harder for anyone else to break in.

In a way, what has happened with UK political blogging is a bit like what has happened with UK supermarkets. There, too, you have a "big four" in Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons, with the smaller players a long way behind.

Gordon's paper anniversary

In today's column in the Newcastle Journal, I concede that I got it wrong about Gordon Brown. Well, sort of. You'll have to read to the end to find out what I mean!

***

This Friday, June 27, Gordon Brown will mark what, in usual circumstances, would be a significant political milestone – the first anniversary of his succession to the premiership.

When 12 months ago the newly-elected Prime Minister addressed the nation outside No 10 Downing Street, little could he have imagined how quickly his fortunes would turn around.

He spoke then of his old school motto: “I will try my utmost.” Later, in his first Labour Party conference speech as premier, he promised: “I will not let you down.”

But sadly, that is exactly what he has done. Indeed for many people, to describe the Brown premiership as a let-down would be the understatement of the century.

Over the years leading up to Mr Brown’s accession to the top job, there was a widespread view among centre-left commentators that he would be an improvement on what had gone before.

Since I was one of those who shared that analysis, this column amounts to something of a mea culpa.

We thought that Mr Brown would cast off his customary dourness once he got to No 10. We thought he would put an end to spin. We thought he would lead the Labour Party in a fresh and radical new direction.

And on all of those scores, the truth of the matter is that we got him wrong.

Part of my optimism about Mr Brown as a putative Prime Minister was based on my knowledge of him as a private man, and the hope and expectation that his personal qualities would shine through once he assumed the top job.

In all my admittedly limited dealings with them, I found he and Tony Blair to be an almost exact reversal of their public personas.

On the three occasions I interviewed Mr Blair for this newspaper, I found him shy, ill-at-ease and totally unable to make even the most rudimentary small-talk.

Mr Brown, by contrast, I found charming, witty, eager to engage in conversation - in short, nothing like the grim Stalinist control-freak he is now widely perceived as.

There were other grounds for optimism. Mr Brown had always portrayed himself as the serious one in the Blair-Brown partnership, and after a decade of showmanship from Mr Blair, the public seemed ready for that.

Allied to this was a feeling that the new man would eschew then reliance on spin that tarnished the Blair era - “not Flash, just Gordon” as the slogan put it.

It could have been a winner, but as the commentator Jonathan Freedland pointed out this week, Brown himself put paid to it by his behaviour over the election-that-never-was last autumn.

“The effect was to show that Brown was as much a calculating schemer as anyone else in the trade – he just wasn’t very skilful or subtle at it. Not flash, just a politician,” he wrote.

But above all, our optimism about Gordon Brown was based on his long record of championing the social justice agenda within a government that often seemed careless of traditional Labour values.

He, after all, was the Chancellor who quietly redistributed billions of pounds to the worst-off in society via his system of tax credits.

He was the man whose successive comprehensive spending reviews pumped billions more into the vital public services on which the worst-off in society most depended.

And he was the man who, each September, would stand up and reassure the party faithful that real Labour “var-lews” as he called them had not been forgotten despite all appearances to the contrary.

Was he just playing to the left-wing gallery all that time? Well, it would seem so.

When Mr Brown took over, the expectation was that he would “hit the ground running” with a blitz of an announcements designed to signal a clean break with the Blair era.

In his statement outside No 10, he appeared to encourage that view, declaring that this would be a “new government with new priorities” and concluding with the words: “Now let the work of change begin.”

But to paraphrase an old political joke, while he may have been elected as New Brown, but he has governed very much as Old Blair.

So there has been no attempt, for instance, to tackle the widening inequalities in our society, or address the decline in social mobility that occurred throughout the Thatcher-Major-Blair years.

And far from drawing a line under Mr Blair’s foreign policy disasters, if anything last week’s press conference with President Bush showed him in full Blair mode.

Our expectations of Mr Brown weren’t purely based on wishful thinking. Radical plans for his premiership were indeed drawn up before he took over, some of which were briefed in advance to journalists.

But when it came to the crunch, Mr Brown bottled it, just as he bottled out of the election and just as he has now bottled out of taking on David Davis over 42-day detention – a decision he may well come to regret.

The real tragedy, though, is that we didn’t really get Mr Brown wrong at all. He is indeed all those things we always thought he was.

He is a decent, serious man with a passion for social justice and an overriding concern for the underdog. What he lacked was simply the political courage to be himself once he got to No 10.

That fatal loss of nerve is the single biggest reason why Gordon won’t be hanging out the bunting as he marks his first anniversary this Friday, and why his primary emotion will be one of relief at having lasted even a year.

I for one would currently lay reasonably long odds against him making it to two

Talking Total Politics

The new monthly political magazine Total Politics is launching next week and I am pleased to say that I will be contributing to it in a freelance capacity.

I will be writing a regular column for the mag called "Where are they now?" which will focus on people who enjoyed a brief fifteen minutes of political fame before disappearing into the obscurity from whence they came.

Typical examples will include Lib Dem by-election victors who lost their seats at the subsequent GE, long forgotten loony-left council leaders from the 1980s, and Tory MPs whose Westminster careers were flushed into oblivion by the Blair landslide in 1997.

I'm very pleased to have been given this opportunity by the carefully politically-balanced Total Politics team headed by publisher Iain Dale (Con) and editor Sarah Mackinlay (Lab), and wish them well with the launch.

The last days of the Raj?

As a fellow University College London alumnus I naturally wish Raj Persaud well in his efforts to save his career amid accusations of plagiarising other peoples' work. Whatever else you say about him, he has certainly put psychiatry on the media map.

That said, I can't say I am hugely surprised that Persaud has found himself in a situation where his skill for self-publicism appears to have backfired on him.

In my first year, he was chair of the UCL Labour Club, in which capacity he demonstrated an easy charm and ability to bullshit which was almost pre-Blairite in its magnitude. I thought then that he could have gone a long way in national politics had he chosen to.

Later, he signed my nomination papers for an elected student union post only to tell me afterwards that he had voted for someone else. This too, I later came to learn, was a fairly commonplace practice among political types.