Joan Smith – As I please

WHEN I remarked in this column last month that Labour MPs were finally beginning to emerge from denial about the shortcomings of Gordon Brown, I wasn’t suggesting they should rush out and commit mass political suicide. Since the local elections, senior members of the party have been hurling abuse at each other, party workers are in despair and one of the weirdest trios of assassins I’ve ever encountered – Lord Levy, Cherie Blair and John Prescott – are inflicting as much damage as it’s possible to imagine. Labour gives every impression of being on the edge of a nervous breakdown and, naturally, the press loves it.

Stop. Shut up. Think. The worst time to make decisions is in a state of deep shock and that – with a big dose of panic – is what’s gripping Labour at the moment. The leader has to be changed before the next general election, but it can’t be done immediately. The score-settlers have done their damage, setting themselves up for years of justified mockery, and the party urgently needs to regain a sense of discipline. The alternative is that Labour spends the next two years squabbling in public, fights a general election under a terminally wounded leader and finds itself out of power for a generation.

No one should fool themselves that Labour can continue under Brown, minimise a defeat in 2010 and turn the Tories out four years later. The 10p tax rate disaster is definitive evidence that Brown is out of touch with the country he is supposed to be governing; millions of low-paid workers don’t live in “hard-working families”, don’t have dependent children and aren’t entitled to claim the tax credits which the then Chancellor expected to protect them. The package Alistair Darling had to come up with to see off a backbench rebellion doesn’t help many of these people, who are quite reasonably up in arms at the spectacle of this Labour Government increasing taxes on the poor while fabulously wealth non-doms splurge on yachts and mansions.

This is getting it wrong on an epic scale and it’s particularly dangerous at a moment when the Conservatives have a leader who is very good at looking and sounding modern. It’s largely a triumph of public relations, but David Cameron is an accomplished salesman who is making the most of the public’s boredom with Labour. After 11 years in power, the party would have to find a new narrative even if things were going well, but they aren’t and Brown is too wedded to the past. This isn’t so much a question of age – he is younger than two of the leading presidential candidates in the United States – as temperament and outlook.

Labour needs a new leader who combines the best of Tony Blair – his easy charm and confidence – with a convincing vision of the future. One of the effects of the Blair-Brown dominance over the party since 1994 has been to stifle originality and talent, producing a generation of ministers who felt too constrained to go even mildly off-message or stimulate debate. Now the Prime Minister is so damaged, that situation no longer pertains and my advice to ambitious senior ministers is to start pouring out ideas.

They are desperately needed. The local election results confirmed that the racist right is gaining ground because of Labour’s failure to confront the consequences of a low-wage economy and an acute shortage of affordable housing. These are the things Labour should be talking about, instead of being drawn into bilious gossip, and anyone who wants to succeed Brown has, in my view, only a few months to set out his or her stall. Last year’s deputy leadership contest was an unsatisfactory surrogate, with most of the candidates being careful not to offend Brown, but now we need to see what people such as David Miliband and Alan Johnson are really made of.

The other process that needs to begin is the sensitive one of persuading the Prime Minister that the way to restore his reputation is to leave office in a few months with dignity. It would be far better to do that, at a time of his own choosing than have to resign abruptly after a disastrous election defeat, as John Major did in 1997. Major’s resignation left the Tories flailing, initiating a period in which they had three leaders in quick succession and lost two more elections. That should be an awful warning to the Labour Party, whose own capacity for picking the wrong leader is unrivalled.

Right now, the only story Labour has to offer is a gruesome soap opera starring a disgruntled fundraiser, a former Deputy Prime Minister with an eating disorder and a former Prime Minister’s wife who could not even manage her contraceptive arrangements. Whatever they imagined they were doing, these intimates of Tony Blair have exposed the most dysfunctional aspects of his administration and underlined the need for a clean break. The most crucial decision of Gordon Brown’s political career may yet be the moment when he bows to the inevitable and leaves Downing Street.