It isn’t over. The reshuffle, the plots and counter-plots; all of it is driven by fear, and that fear is not going to go away. Two forces are in play: Gordon Brown’s terror of being driven from office, and the anxiety of Labour MPs and activists that his premiership is destroying the party. On Monday night, MPs dragged themselves to a long meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party where Brown appeared contrite and fear held back some MPs and ministers who privately want him to go. In recent weeks, they have been battered by an unprecedented wave of public hatred over their expenses, electoral losses and the election of two British National Party candidates to the European Parliament.
Each day MPs have been braced for the next attack, watching in horror as another colleague is ridiculed and humiliated. Decent people have been forced out – I am thinking particularly of Ian Gibson – while others are facing certain defeat and an unknown future at the next general election. Fear creates paralysis, and it’s hard to think of a group of people less psychologically prepared to take big, bold decisions than the PLP. That isn’t true of everyone and on Monday evening some brave individuals told the Prime Minister to his face that he should go. Some MPs stayed silent out of loyalty or fear of triggering an immediate general election – a myth which has taken hold in much the same way as the certain existence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction – and others are still hoping against hope that Brown can change.
Their motives may be honourable, but they are wrong. The crisis that now faces the Labour Party, and it is one about its very survival, is inextricably linked with the personality of one man. In the past five or six years, British politics has been shaped by Gordon Brown’s conviction that he has a right to be Prime Minister. Brown’s ambition is the most powerful thing about him; it drove Tony Blair from office, it denied us a choice of successor, it has damaged the career of anyone who opposes him, and now it is in danger of destroying the Labour Party. It’s a crisis driven by psychology, not politics, and that is why so many MPs (and the Prime Minister himself) express puzzlement about how we arrived at this pass.
Here is the answer, and it isn’t just that Brown is a dreadful communicator. His body language is ungainly, his speaking style ponderous and didactic, and he has the misfortune to be up against a Conservative leader, David Cameron, who is quick-thinking and attractive. More significant is the disjunction between Brown’s idea of himself as someone motivated by the highest moral imperatives – justice, equality and human rights – and people’s experience of him. His constant references to the manse and his Presbyterian conscience inevitably grate in a modern secular world, but the heart of the problem lies in how he runs his Government.
After her resignation on Monday, Jane Kennedy spilled the beans about the smear operation run by Number 10, talking about the lines ministers were handed to use against James Purnell. It’s not the first such allegation and the people Brown likes to have around him – Damian McBride and now Alan Sugar – embody the sexist, sneering culture which has done so much to coarsen public life. It’s not remotely surprising that the Prime Minister is haemorrhaging female ministers; among the most telling charges they make is that they have been excluded from his inner circle, never properly listened to and undermined in briefings as soon as they left office.
Hazel Blears has been attacked by colleagues and activists since her hugely damaging resignation the day before the European elections, but the real point is why she was driven to it. Brown singled out Blears’ housing arrangements as “unacceptable” when she was named in the Daily Telegraph but failed to criticise more favoured male members of the Cabinet on similar grounds. It was a staggering act of disloyalty, and Blears, Caroline Flint and the other ministers who have resigned in the last few days look very much like women driven beyond endurance.
It wasn’t until the PLP meeting on Monday night that the Prime Minister talked about the expenses row and finally acknowledged that most Labour MPs haven’t done anything wrong. He should have taken responsibility weeks ago for a ramshackle expenses system which left MPs not knowing what they were entitled to claim and condemned a handful of cases that seem to amount to fraud. But Brown should also have asserted his belief in the integrity of the vast majority of MPs, instead of protecting his favourites and throwing others to the wolves. Fairness and equality are not airy-fairy concepts which apply to debt in Africa but not to colleagues in the House of Commons.
Gordon Brown’s response to the expenses row has been panicked, craven and utterly disloyal. These are not characteristics which make a good Prime Minister. Policies can be changed but character rarely is. And that is why the Labour Party will continue in turmoil as long as he remains leader.
