It is good to know that Gordon Brown’s appearance tonight in front of Labour MPs is being briefed at Westminster, in the Guardian’s words, as “a symbolic display of renewed collegiate leadership”. At least that’s honest. Because the display of collegiality will not be a real one but a show.
Brown will speak to the parliamentary Labour party flanked by three human shields in the form of Lord Mandelson, whose title du jour is “chair of Labour election strategy”, Douglas Alexander, the party’s so-called “election co-ordinator” and Harriet Harman, who has apparently been promised “a significant profile” in the election campaign by the prime minister. Let us hope that Brown’s promise to Harman proves to be more bankable than those which he made a few months ago to Patricia Hewitt, that she would become the next British EU commissioner, and then to Geoff Hoon, to whom Brown then promised the same job.
Right now it is hard to think of three cabinet ministers who better represent the unhappiness that Labour continues to inflict on itself through its dogged determination to stick with Brown as leader to the bitter end. Let’s take each of them in turn, and imagine some of the thoughts that are likely to go through their minds as Brown once again promises to be a unifying and inclusive leader this evening.
Mandelson was not one of the ministers who apparently confronted Brown on Wednesday afternoon to demand changes in his leadership style as their price for giving him their renewed backing. That role was played by Alastair Darling, Jack Straw and Harman. But Mandelson didn’t have a confrontation with Brown last Wednesday because he had had one all of his own a few days previously. Mandelson had a falling out with Brown over the new year. Like Darling and the others, he was also fed up about the lack of inclusivity and about Ed Balls’s inside track. But his more fundamental anger was about the way Brown and Balls were positioning the Labour party. He wanted Brown to stop pretending that Labour did not face spending dilemmas, to stop pretending that Labour would not have to make cuts, to stop pretending that higher taxation was the right message for the party and to stop pretending that Labour did not have a mixed record when Brown himself was chancellor for 10 years. Mandelson and Brown continue to get on and to work together, but this recent row was a very big one. Mandelson may not think there is a plausible alternative to Brown as leader right now, but he is certainly fed up with Brown and his ways all the same. He will put on a good act this evening, but inside him the worm has turned.
Then we come to Alexander, the perennially youthful looking former bag-carrier for Brown. Alexander is too frightened of Brown to say so himself, but it has been an open secret for the last couple of years that Alexander is unhappy with the way that Brown has treated him. Much of the reason for that distress came out in Peter Watt’s account of the 2007 on-off election debacle, serialised in the Mail on Sunday yesterday. The former Labour general secretary reported Alexander as saying to him in 2007: “The truth is, Peter, we have spent years working with this guy and we don’t actually like him. We have always thought that the longer the public had to get to know him, the less they would like him as well.” Prescient words – and we can be confident they will be recycled throughout the election. For Alexander to stand next to Brown and profess his confidence in the PM’s collegiality is about as convincing as hearing Tiger Woods continue to extol the virtues of marital fidelity.
Like Alexander, Harriet Harman has spent most of the past 15 years as a fully signed-up Brownite. She was Brown’s lieutenant as shadow chief secretary long ago in the pre-1997 era. She fought his corner against Frank Field over welfare and benefits reform in her first turn in government under Tony Blair. She was a Brown cheerleader for most of the years in which the then chancellor battled to unseat Blair. As the succession neared, she thought that Brown wanted her as his deputy – not realising that he hinted as much to all the candidates. Since 2007, she has always seen herself as Labour’s empowered number two, entitled to be treated as Brown’s closest and most senior confidante. Lately, however, the penny has finally dropped that, to Brown, she has always been a pawn in the game. This was just as true in the long campaign against Blair as more recently, since it has at last become clear to her that Brown never wanted a deputy with any rights or power and that she was in most respects merely a trophy subordinate in his eyes. That is why Harman was such a key player last week in the hapless revolt launched by her old friend Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon.
This evening, therefore, Brown will be surrounded by colleagues who have every reason to be suspicious of his true intentions and very few reasons to believe that he will reciprocate the loyalty that they have more often than not given to him. Even now, part of each of these three Labour politicians wants to believe that Brown will change, even though each of them really knows from long experience that he won’t. Gordon Brown will be 59 next month. Men of 59 don’t often change their habits and Brown has never given any hint that he is one of the exceptions. Why is it, I asked a old and utterly reliable contact in the Labour party at the weekend, that so many people go on thinking that Brown is someone different from the Brown they have experienced and can see? The reply was short and to the point: “Fear of him and his thugs”.
I don’t believe for one moment that Mandelson, Alexander or Harman expects that Brown will really govern in a different way since last week’s failed revolt. I think they think they might be able to cramp his style a bit – and that this will help Labour’s cause. But when Brown announces to Labour MPs this evening, as he is expected to do, that he will serve a full five-year term if Labour wins the general election, I suspect that all three of them, as well as most people in the room, will not know whether to laugh or cry. If they thought there was the remotest possibility that Brown would still be prime minister after the general election, the whole cabinet as well as most Labour MPs would have had him out months ago.
It all goes to show that they all kid themselves about Brown, even now. If Brown wakes up on the day after the election facing anything other than unequivocal defeat, you can depend upon one thing above all. He will cling on to power by any means to hand. The fact that most Labour MPs have completely ruled such a possibility out in their own minds is, paradoxically, the only thing that keeps Brown in power as Labour leader today.
Does the Iraq war still matter in the evolving party politics of 2010? Both the Guardian’s editorial and my colleague Jonathan Freedland pondered this question today in the wake of Alastair Campbell’s all-day session yesterday in front of the Chilcot inquiry. Both writers thought that, for all Iraq’s immensity, the verdict was not proven. But they both might have been surprised at how quickly the Iraq issue has in fact forced its way up the agenda in the House of Commons today.
Midway through a second successive bullish PMQs performance by Gordon Brown – the outside world may not be noticing Brown’s improved showings but Labour MPs are – the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg rose and asked Brown whether he will now give his own evidence to the Chilcot committee before – rather than after – the general election. Brown responded by saying that Sir John Chilcot was in charge of his own procedure and had asked him to give his evidence after the inquiry’s expected period of election purdah – and added: “I have nothing to hide on this matter.” This shouldn’t be a question for Chilcot, Clegg retorted, but for Brown’s own conscience. It was he who signed the cheques for the invasion. Later on, Lib Dem MP David Heath had another go. Did Brown regret any of the decisions he made on Iraq? Was he prepared to say sorry? I stand by the decisions we made, Brown replied.
Who would have thought, as Andrew Neil later observed on the BBC’s Daily Politics, that we would still be talking about Iraq in January 2010? To which one answer is that Neil can’t have been reading many of the online debates about the subject here and on many other sites that have been going on for as long as some of us can remember. A more interesting dimension, though, is why Iraq has risen to the top of the party political agenda now, and whether it really is an issue.
The immediate reason for Clegg’s pressure is obvious. Campbell rather carefully pointed out to the inquiry yesterday that Brown was at an awful lot of the key meetings – not just cabinet meetings but other gatherings too – in the run-up to Iraq. He shared some of the responsibility for the decision and he knows a lot about it first-hand. If Brown was to be called early, pre-election, by Chilcot, then the hearing would be massively reported and, whether or not Brown gave a plausible account of himself, the occasion would help to root Brown in the tarnished Iraq policy of Tony Blair.
Clegg clearly sees this as a win-win-win opportunity. If Brown refuses to volunteer – and as Charles Kennedy pointed out later in conversation with Neil, he could and should have been asked to do so – then he becomes a man with something to hide. If Brown does go before Chilcot, he either emerges as a man who shares responsibility for Iraq (as he accepted today) or as a man who went along with a policy he now rejects (if he tries to distance himself from Blair).
Whichever way you look at it, this is good for the Lib Dems. It reminds voters that they were right on Iraq and the other parties were wrong. It shows leftwing, antiwar and ex-Labour voters that Clegg, sometimes depicted as a rightwinger, is alive to their concerns. And it draws attention to the wider positioning that Clegg sketched out earlier this week, of a more limited but distinctive set of Lib Dem campaign principles.
Iraq is not going to be a dominant issue in the 2010 election. It wasn’t even a dominant issue in the 2005 contest, when it might have been, though it certainly had an effect in some seats, especially university seats, and it underlay a lot of the waning enthusiasm for Blair. But it will still have some impact this time around, nevertheless. It is bound to be a net gainer for the Lib Dems, even if it is not at the heart of the party’s pitch, and it is bound to be a net loser for Labour and even the Tories among voters who are particularly sensitive on the issue. There’s life in this epic subject yet. Which is why I’d be astonished if Brown was on the phone to Chilcot this afternoon trying to schedule an early hearing.
