Where are they now No 4

The latest edition of Total Politics is now in circulation together with the fourth instalment of my "Where Are They Now?" series of columns. This one focuses on the Liberal Democrat David Bellotti who won one of the most significant by-elections in modern times in 1990, but whose newsworthiness lay less in his rather inconsequential political career and more in having been one of the worst football club proprietors in the history of the game.

How the Prawn Cocktail Offensive skewered New Labour

What with global economic meltdown and the ongoing crisis over Gordon Brown's leadership, poor Nick Clegg found himself struggling for attention this week. Here's today's column from the Newcastle Journal.

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There is an old and venerable tradition in this column, going back a decade or more, that each September the Liberal Democrats get an annual opportunity to bask in the Linford, er, spotlight.

It’s only fair, after all, that a party that is invariably subjected to the third-party squeeze should have at least once chance each year to get its message across.

They certainly need it, with one poll this week showing the party’s share of the vote down to 12pc – its lowest standing since the early days of Paddy Ashdown’s leadership.

Two changes of leader since 2005 have not altered the party’s fundamental problem: that the Tory revival under David Cameron looks set to deprive it of most of its MPs in the South and West, with few corresponding gains from Labour in the North.

New-ish leader Nick Clegg did at least demonstrate this week that, like Mr Cameron, he too can make a speech without notes, even if he needed the help of a set of giant autocues all around the conference hall in Bournemouth.

And he did demonstrate a determination to reach out to voters on both right and left, in a tactically clever speech that managed to be both redistributionist and tax-cutting.

But sorry chaps, it is impossible, for this year at least, for me to devote to your conference the level of attention to which you have become accustomed in previous years.

In a week which saw both continuing global economic meltdown and the beginnings of a concrete challenge to Gordon Brown’s leadership, the events in Bournemouth were no more than a sideshow.

It was a desperate, desperate week for the Prime Minister. As he battles to save his premiership, the one thing he needed above all was a trouble-free run-in to his party’s conference.

But his hopes of presiding over a moreorless united gathering in Manchester were shot to pieces last Friday evening when junior whip Siobhain McDonough went public with her call for a leadership challenge.

Ms McDonough was followed out of the door by party vice-chair Joan Ryan and special envoy Barry Gardiner, while another 12 MPs put their name to a barely-coded call for leadership change.

Finally, on Tuesday, came the resignation of David Cairns, Minister of State at the Scotland Office and the most senior figure so far to put his head above the parapet.

The rebels are as yet small in number. But it’s not about numbers so much as momentum, and the momentum is with the rebels.
Thus far, the revolt has spread from a couple of obscure backbenchers to former cabinet ministers to the whips office to the parliamentary private secretaries and finally to a minister of state.

It is surely now only a matter of time before it spreads to the Cabinet, with Barrow MP and Business Secretary John Hutton the overwhelming favourite to wield the knife.

The fact that Mr Hutton could not bring himself to condemn those MPs who have called for a leadership challenge this week was surely significant.

I myself have thought it likely for some time that Mr Brown would face a challenge this autumn, and before the recess, I argued on these pages that he probably should face one.

That said, it would have made a certain amount of sense for the rebels to hear what Mr Brown had to say in his conference speech before rushing to judgement about his prospects.

What the rebels are effectively saying is that there is nothing he can possibly say in his speech on Monday that can make any difference to his public standing – which is a somewhat crass position to adopt.

They may well be right – but if so, why not wait until after the speech before speaking out? It would, after all, only serve to make their argument that much stronger.

The one thing, it seems, that might rescue Mr Brown, is the continuing economic turmoil resulting from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the near-collapse of HBOS.

It certainly seems to have removed the immediate threat. As Harriet Harman said on Question Time, holding a leadership contest while people are worried about their jobs and savings would make little sense to the public.

It is a seductively persuasive argument, but the events of the past week have not removed the Prime Minister’s underlying political weakness. Indeed, if anything, they have intensified it.

What we are actually seeing is the old argument about Mr Brown being the “best person” to deal with economic turmoil being turned on its head. Increasingly, people are in fact blaming him for the mess.

The Prime Minister’s announcement on Thursday about “cleaning up the city” is a case in point. If it needs “cleaning up” now, what on earth was Mr Brown doing as Chancellor for 10 years to allow it get in such a state?

The truth is, New Labour made a strategic decision a decade and a half ago that it needed to win the support of big business in order to demonstrate its credibility as a party of government.

It was once known as the Prawn Cocktail offensive - in the days when City executives still ate the stuff. Nowadays it would probably be called the Seared Scallops offensive instead.

Either way, the upshot was that when Labour came to power, it proceeded to apply a light-touch regulatory framework that was never likely to prevent a credit-fuelled boom getting out of hand.

To my mind, Mr Brown will now forever be haunted by the phrase which, during the early years of his Chancellorship, he made his own: “No return to Tory boom and bust.”

Back in the days when “Prudence” ruled the roost at No 11, he was as good as his word – but eventually, he allowed his vanity – or was it just ambition? – to get the better of him.

Like Anthony Barber and Nigel Lawson before him, Mr Brown found the temptation to bask in the reflected glory of economic good times too hard to resist.

Now, as Prime Minister, he is reaping the whirlwind – and how.

Stating the obvious

Alan Milburn says that Labour must bring forward a message of "change" if the party is to win the next election. John Prescott says that in order to win the party needs to remain united.

They may be coming at the situation facing the party from different directions, but both are right.

There can be no happy outcome

Firstly, I apologise for the lack of blogging during the past few days. Partly it's down to other commitments, but also it's down a feeling of deep despair about the current state of politics and the apparent sad denouement to which the Gordon Brown administration appears to be heading.

Today has seen the resignation of David Cairns and by all accounts two more Ministers of State are likely to follow. Take your pick from Tony McNulty, David Hanson, Liam Byrne, Jim Murphy, Kim Howells, Pat McFadden, Bill Rammell and Ben Bradshaw. It could be any of them, though Byrne would probably be the most damaging.

I still think these are essentially too disparate a group of people to be acting as part of some dark plot being co-ordinated behind the scenes by John Reid or even by Tony Blair as some bloggers have sought to suggest. But in that probably lies their strength.

If this was a Blairite plot, I think the charge would have stuck by now, and the party rallied much more strongly behind Gordon. The right-wing bloggers who delight in taunting Brown may find it hard to believe, but the very last thing the Labour Party wants - or for that matter needs - is a return to Blairism.

I myself thought it likely for some time that Gordon would face a leadership challenge this autumn, and before the recess, I argued that he probably should face one, on the grounds that he has failed to restore Labour's lost moral compass as his supporters hoped.

However he still had a few cards left to play - the September relaunch, the reshuffle, the conference speech, and finally the electoral test offered by the Glenrothes by-election. In my view, he should have been allowed to play those cards before the party was forced to reach a conclusion about whether his leadership should continue.

As it is, I think the failure of the party to remain united at this critical time has made it moreorless inevitable that there can be no happy outcome for Mr Brown. In other words, the rebels have created for the party a self-fullfilling prophecy - which no doubt was the intention of some of them.

It's not about numbers - remember that Chamberlain was never defeated in the Commons in 1940 - it's about momentum. And the political narrative created by these sackings and resignations will ultimately ensure that all roads conspire towards one end.

But what most deeply depresses me about all this is not the fact that a politician I still admire has failed to live up to the high hopes invested in him. It is the fact that politics is increasingly starting to resemble a reality TV show.

Political leaders who once might have expected to be around for a generation as Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher were, or going further back, for several generations in the case of Gladstone and Churchill, now have a shelf-life of only a few years before an increasingly superficial electorate becomes bored of them.

Over the past 11 years, the Tories have had five leaders, the Liberal Democrats four, and by the end of the year Labour will possibly have had three, but I don't think this rapid turnover is because the quality of political leadership is declining. It is rather a by-product of a national obsession with celebrity which in turn demands a style of political leadership based on glitz and "personality" rather than solid achievement.

For me, the accession of Gordon Brown represented a chance to put an end to all this rubbish. The most baleful legacy of his apparent failure will be to condemn the United Kingdom to twenty or thirty years of showbiz politics.

The week ahead in view

This week the blog welcomes a new regular feature courtesy of budding cartoonist Slob. Not surprisingly his first contribution focuses on Nick Cleggover and the Lib Dem conference which began yesterday.

The vision comes into view

Is the Brown government finally starting to set out a distinctive political agenda? Here's my column from today's Newcastle Journal.

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When he stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister less than 15 months ago, Gordon Brown told us his would be “a new government with new priorities.”

Ever since then, though, the country has waited in vain for some demonstration of how exactly he planned to renew the government, and how its priorities would be different.

Most people, including myself, have moreorless given up hope of hearing the answer, concluding that Mr Brown’s administration has no real purpose beyond staying in power as long as possible.

But this week, at five minutes to midnight in political terms, some straws in the wind began to emerge. Could Gordon, at long last, be about to set out his long-awaited “vision?”

What kicked it all off was an article in the obscure and normally uncontroversial Parliamentary Monitor, an in-house Commons magazine read exclusively by MPs, their staff, and people who attend party conferences.

Among other things, Mr Brown said it was time to “adapt and rethink New Labour policy” and admitted that something needed to be done to kick-start social mobility.

The Prime Minister’s spin doctors attempted to play down the significance of those words, but in a speech to the TUC the following day, his deputy Harriet Harman went much further.

Her address, saying the government needed to start tackling the inequality of opportunity between "rich and poor" and "north and south” had the Tories foaming at the mouth about a new “class war.”

So what’s happening? Well, it was understandable that Team Brown would try to make light of it all.

The worst thing that could happen, going in to what really is a make-or-break conference season for the Prime Minister, is for expectations about his big speech the week after next to get out of hand.

But nevertheless, I think we are finally seeing the genesis of a distinctive Brown agenda, although whether it will do much to rescue his political fortunes is very open to doubt.

Labour will probably call it “fairness first.” The Tories will brand it a “lurch to the left.” Either way, it is, at last, authentic Gordon.

Mr Brown’s comments in the Monitor contained more clues as to what he’s going to say in Manchester a week on Monday than the average Agatha Christie novel.

“We need to be honest with ourselves: while poverty has been reduced and the rise in inequality halted, social mobility has not improved in Britain as we would have wanted,” he wrote.

"A child's social class background at birth is still the best predictor of how well he or she will do at school and later on in life. Our ambitions for a fairer Britain cannot be satisfied in the face of these injustices."

“At our conference in Manchester and in the weeks that follow, I will set out how I – and our party, and our government, and our country – must rise to conquer those challenges and to ensure fairness for all.”

The theme was picked up by Ms Harman on Wednesday when she said she wanted everyone to "get a fair crack of the whip" whatever their "socio-economic class.”

It was entirely predictable that the Tories would cry “class war!” with Shadow Commons Leader Teresa May saying focusing on class and background was "outdated and distracts from the real issues.”

If Britain was a genuinely classless society, she would be right. But whereas class distinctions did begin to blur in the 70s and 80s, the whole point about social mobility is that it has since ground to a halt.

Ms Harman is doing no more than point out a very obvious truth, albeit one that, Darlington MP Alan Milburn aside, New Labour has refused to talk about for most of the past decade.

All of this ought to be music to the ears of Labour supporters in the North-East – assuming they are still listening, that is.

Narrowing the gap in economic growth rates between the North and South used to be an explicit aim of government policy, but it was quietly dropped once they realised how difficult it would be – and that it would involve spending large amounts of money in the poorer regions.

These days, it is rare to find explicit mention of the North-South divide in Labour ministerial speeches, but Ms Harman appears to have bucked that depressing trend.

Sure, it needs to be backed up by some action – but if it’s a sign that regional inequalities are back on the government’s radar, then it’s certainly a start.

The wider politics of all this are unclear. The Tories will doubtless try to characterise it as a “core vote strategy” on Labour’s part, claiming they are vacating the much-prized “political centre ground.”

But to my mind, that analysis falls into the Blairite trap of arguing that any departure from the “Middle England” agenda of the previous Prime Minister spells electoral doom for Labour.

What Messrs Brown and Harman are saying is no more than what used to be known as good old-fashioned “One Nation” politics – the idea that economic and social divisions are quite simply bad for the country as a whole.

I think Mr Brown is quite capable of making a reasoned case for this without looking like some throwback to the 1970s Trotskyist left.

As I have written before, the growth in inequality that has occurred under a party whose whole raison d’etre was to help the worst-off is the biggest single blot on Labour’s record over the past 11 years.

If they can start to turn that around in their 12th and 13th years in office, they will at least have done something to redeem themselves.

It is unlikely, if we’re honest, to alter the result of the next election on its own. But if Labour is destined to lose, the party will at least leave office with its head held higher.

The “fairness agenda” may not gain Mr Brown more support. What it will do is gain him more respect.