by David Mills
DURING the dog days of the summer, it seemed almost unthinkable that the political tide would ever turn against the Conservatives and in the Prime Minister’s favour. Yet the global financial meltdown has handed Gordon Brown the political initiative, and now the social connections of his erstwhile enemy and new best friend Peter Mandelson have given David Cameron his first real “sleaze” problem since becoming leader.
If George Osborne survives the current furore over what he said to a Russian oligarch on a billionaire’s yacht in Greece during the summer – and in the absence of a more openly smoking gun than the testimony of Nathaniel Rothschild and his friend James Goodwin, he may well hang on – his political credibility has taken a huge dent. It’s one thing to consort with rich men on their yachts and for the subject of donations to arise, but quite another for it to happen with Mandelson in the vicinity – a misjudgement which will have had his colleagues pinching themselves at his naivety. Osborne has almost as many enemies within the Conservative Party as outside it, acting as something of a lightning conductor for his leader. Cameron might even be secretly relieved that the lustre has been knocked off his Shadow Chancellor, who was credited with the Tories’ renaissance after the inheritance tax announcement last autumn, and whose council tax plans went down well at this year’s gathering. There truly are no real friendships at the top.
Meanwhile, changes in the Number 10 press operation suggest that the Government will operate with a harder political edge in the months ahead. The Prime Minister’s new joint press secretaries come from a Labour Party background and will no doubt be looking to exploit the opportunity which the financial crisis and “Yachtgate” have handed to the Prime Minister. One of the new appointees, John Woodcock, is rumoured to have already got one major Tory scalp under his belt, having accounted for Howard Flight when he is said to have surreptitiously recorded the then-Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury making ill-advised comments about tax to a meeting of the Conservative Way Forward pressure group in the run-up to the 2005 election. According to Westminster myth, Woodcock provided the ammunition and Michael Howard did the rest, in a ruthless assassination which brought an end not just to Flight’s shadow cabinet career, but to his political career as well.
Woodcock’s colleague, Michael Dugher, has the best part of
15 years’ experience in the labour movement, working for trade unions and latterly for ministers as a special advisor, where he always relished the explicitly political side of his work. Neither come from a classically Brownite background: Dugher has always eluded neat categorisation in Labour Party terms, as one might expect of someone who has worked for Frank Dobson, John Spellar, Ken Jackson, Stephen Byers and Geoff Hoon, while Woodcock was a special advisor to the Blairites’ Blairite, John Hutton. Further evidence, if it were needed that, at the top of the party anyway, they are all Brownites now – for the time being, at least.
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