Divided, out of touch and heading for defeat say the polls. I have weaknesses, I have strengths, I will dedicate myself to a new spirit of public accountability and greater transparency in government, and I will listen, Gordon Brown tells his MPs.
A week later, two announcements issue from Number 10. One is that the long-awaited inquiry into the run-up to and conduct of Britain’s invasion and occupation of Iraq as sidekick to the United States is to be held in secret. The second is the appointment of a new, slick spin-doctor in Simon Lewis, late of royal circles and brother of the editor of the Daily Telegraph. Mr Brown would have had an opportunity to meet the wider family at the wedding of The Sun’s editor Rebekah Wade, which he found time to attend.
Meanwhile, in Blackpool and Brighton, two trade unions whose members are on the frontline of crunch-time Britain were debating the real issues affecting millions of families across the country. At both the GMB and Unison conferences, voice was given to the rising feeling that there is a terminal disconnect between the Government and those who are losing their jobs or are under threat of losing them, those in need of better services, who want a fairer society, fairer taxes and a decent home, or any home.
The people that Downing Street strategists want to bring home to Labour are not going to be impressed by a return to the smoothed-tongued double-speak which
has characterised previous prime ministerial spin-doctors.
They do not, to take a totemic example, believe the spin that took Britain into the Iraq war. The widespread pressure for an expectation of a public inquiry into the conflict was borne of a belief that the war was unjustified, illegal and executed on the back of lies spun around the fiction of weapons of mass destruction.
Answers are required to questions that only an inquiry held in public can satisfy. Secrecy will embed the perception that the lies and the spinning continue under a cynical veneer of a probe that entirely misses the point. That the membership of the inquiry has been hand-picked from an establishment of mandarins and sycophants and that it will not report until after the next election is guaranteed to turn that cynicism back on the Government.
Mr Brown received a standing ovation from the GMB in Blackpool. But that act of courtesy does not mask the underlying mood of resignation that, in the absence of a Labour Government with Labour values, the party that was elected to fight harder for them and their interests should be doing so.
In the most forthright warning from the leader of a union still affiliated to Labour, Unison’s Dave Prentis reflected the feelings running high among his members when he warned that there was a limit to the number of “blank cheques” that the union would be prepared to hand over to Labour in future.
What, after all, is the point of unions funding a party which is committed to cuts in public services which hit their own members?
