by David Mills
JUDGED by the criterion of merely keeping the Prime Minister in his job, this conference was a success. Charles Clarke’s spat with John Prescott turned out to be the high watermark of dissent all week, rather than the trigger for a coup, while the rest of the rebels kept fairly quiet.
But Gordon Brown’s immediate future rests on whether his narrative – of Labour and himself being better placed to steer the country through troubled times than the callow duo of David Cameron and George Osborne – will stick. The problem is that, with the Tories more than 20 per cent ahead in the opinion polls, Cameron is not under anywhere near as much pressure at his conference as Brown was this week, and anyway, he tends to perform well under pressure – at least in public.
The truth is that after a week where most things went about as well as could be hoped for from the Prime Minister’s perspective, he is far from being secure in his job.
Even the media coverage of his speech’s best line, about the current situation being no time for novices, reflected the apparent threat to his position from within his own Cabinet.
While speech was well crafted and delivered, given the battering the Government has taken in recent weeks and months, the Labour Party might have been justified in expecting more from its leader. No one minds him being serious – indeed, in the current economic circumstances gravity is a distinct advantage for a party leader to possess. But leaders also need to be able to communicate in a variety of ways, and to a wide range of audiences. Brown has yet to find a way to communicate the vision and the passion which he insists he has for his party and the country on a day-to-day basis once the conference season is over.
If Brown wasn’t quite a winner, the biggest loser was David Miliband. While his speech failed to set the conference alight, the story of him telling his aides that he wanted to avoid a Heseltine moment made him look disloyal.
Having now dithered at least three times over whether to move against Brown – once when he allowed him to succeed to the leadership unopposed, again in the summer when he wrote his Guardian article outlining his vision for the party and omitted to mention his boss, and once more here at this conference – he may discover that the party doesn’t give him a fourth chance, if and when it finally decides that the current leader’s time is up. With his star falling, at least for the time being, the lack of a credible alternative is a huge argument for the party, and especially the Cabinet, giving Brown a while longer to exploit his knowledge and experience. But they won’t give him forever.
If the polls and the wider narrative haven’t moved by Christmas, it’s difficult to see how the Prime Minister can survive far into the New Year.
