Joan Smith - As I please

THIS is a painful time for the Labour Party and I’m sorry if what I’m about to say sounds flippant. But I can at least report some progress since I wrote this column last month, when most Labour MPs still seemed to be clinging to the hope that Gordon Brown would somehow come right as Prime Minister.

Since then, we’ve seen the effect of the abolition of the 10p tax rate, which has made a lot of people on low incomes worse off, and Brown’s strange behaviour over the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. The impression that he isn’t in charge of events has begun to alarm even convinced Brown cheerleaders, while Labour MPs with small majorities are catching an unwelcome glimpse of the likely end of their Westminster careers.

This is all to the good, if I can use that word in a situation as dire as the one we’re in. It means that the Labour Party is moving from the state of denial it has been in for an unconscionably long time – I trace the origins of the present disaster to long before Tony Blair stepped down last summer – and entering a necessary stage of anger and self-doubt.

How different things would have been if Blair had dared to move the Chancellor to a different department a couple of years after Labour’s second general election victory in 2001, making Brown choose between showing he was a team player or returning to the back benches. Whatever Brown decided, MPs would have got an insight into his political judgement and his temperament, which might, in turn, have led to the party insisting on a proper leadership contest last year.

I’m sure that historians will one day discuss why a man who was for so long single-mindedly set on becoming Prime Minister appeared so unready for it when the job finally more or less fell into his lap. I find myself thinking a lot these days about Anthony Eden, on whom George Brown, a former Labour Foreign Secretary and deputy leader, delivered this chilling verdict: “Eden, I had a lot of regard for. But, as Montgomery is alleged to have said about somebody else, ‘his tragedy was that he was promoted above his ceiling. He was not cut out to be the number one; he should have remained number two.’ He was right about Hitler, about Mussolini and about Chamberlain, but he always managed to be late in being right and, even when he was right, he always seemed to remain in two minds.”

As the Tories discovered in 1955, some people are not temperamentally suited to the top job and that will almost certainly be posterity’s verdict on Gordon Brown. And while it’s amusing to watch all the people who used to talk up the PM-in-waiting as they scramble to explain their man’s failures, it does leave Labour with a very big problem.

My view is that these things have to happen one step at a time and there needs to be a gap between acknowledging Brown is not the right leader for the party and the process of beginning to think seriously about his successor. That goes against politicians’ natural instincts, which are to rush into correcting mistakes as swiftly as possible, but Labour MPs should recall the precipitous haste with which the Conservative Party chose a new leader after John Major lost the general election in 1997.

It’s hard to see any way in which the Tories could have won the 2001 election, but they certainly didn’t help themselves by choosing William Hague – a Europhobe who was incapable of uniting his party. Then they revealed something close to a death wish by replacing Hague with Iain Duncan Smith. The last thing Labour needs at this time of crisis is its own version of the “Quiet Man”.

If Labour loses the next general election, whether under Gordon Brown or a hastily-chosen alternative, the party could be out of power for a very long time. It needs time to emerge from the political and emotional paralysis which is the legacy of the Blair-Brown duumvirate – and we can at least be grateful we are witnessing the final days of that fractious partnership.

There doesn’t have to be a general election for another two years and there are so many ways, from constitutional reform to education and foreign policy, in which the Labour project that began in 1997 has proved itself wrong-headed or incomplete.

Anyone who wants to be the next leader should stop defending the Prime Minister and start pouring out ideas, making speeches, writing pamphlets and getting some energy back into depressed and demoralised constituency parties. We can still get out of this mess and the first step is acknowledging that there is a de facto vacancy at the top of the Labour Party.

l This article is posted for debate at www.compassonline.org.uk