Ian Hernon says experienced Labour MPs are lining up to quit and more are likely to follow their lead
As the centenary of the Titanic disaster approaches, Gordon Brown seems to be sailing towards a 2010 electoral iceberg. The character and competence of the Prime Minister, together with his navigation skills, are fast becoming a crucial factor. He has faced a daily avalanche of abuse, unprecedented since the last months of John Major – and perhaps even fiercer than then. No aspect of his personality is now out of media bounds, whether it is his eyesight or his appalling handwriting and misspellings in that letter to the mother of a soldier who was killed in Afghanistan.
His battered Cabinet has let the Tories and the Liberal Democrats off the hook over their plans for the health service, public spending and climate change. They are more concerned with saving their own skins or jockeying for the future leadership. All of which can – just – be countered as we approach polling day. Brown may even benefit from being an underdog.
Much more worrying is the daily haemorrhaging of his backbench rank and file. These are not rats deserting a sinking ship, more the officers and crew.
On Merseyside, three MPs have already announced they are quitting. More are certain to follow. The latest is Wavertree’s Jane Kennedy, a 51-year-old, who should have made it to the Cabinet, but who is now leaving “drained”. As a young woman, she was a hammer against the Militant Tendency in Liverpool. She held ministerial jobs throughout Tony Blair’s decade in power, notably as a Northern Ireland security minister at a crucial time. She was an effective health minister, but quit over planned cuts, later dropped, to children’s hospital budgets. Gordon Brown made her a farming minister, but she left the Government after refusing to give an “oath of loyalty”.
She follows Crosby’s Claire Curtis-Thomas, who is quitting over the torrent of abuse she and her family received over her expenses. Curtis-Thomas accused Brown of lacking leadership qualities. She was dismissed as “no great loss” in Government circles. Her constituency’s twin town in Sierra Leone, where she has been using her engineering expertise to help build schools, might disagree.
Wirral South’s Ben Chapman, who insists he broke no rules over his mortgage claims, is also going. He was a high-flying diplomat who, in his 50s, decided to stand for Labour. Chapman was a diligent parliamentary private secretary to several ministers and a supreme campaigner on fundamental issues such as schools, hospitals, anti-social behaviour and libraries. Those who will lose in any modest electoral swing include Wirral West’s Stephen Hesford, who resigned as PPS to Attorney-General Baroness Scotland over her refusal to stand down and Brown’s reluctance to sack her
after she was fined for employing an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper.
The loss or potential loss of such people shows how bad things have got for Brown. Extrapolate the same casualty list across the country and Labour will be fighting with untrained front line troops. Given all this, it might not take an iceberg to sink this ship of state. An ice lolly could be sufficient.
