News from the New Party

The wrong man for the job?

Gordon Brown is understandably keen to put the disasters of the past four months behind him. However, the idea that at this stage the prime minister can re-launch himself as a decisive, principled and courageous politician who won't duck the big issues is, at best, fanciful. We won't forget the botched non-election, the spouting of BNP slogans at the TUC ("British jobs for British workers"), or the failure to turn up for the signing ceremony of the European Reform Treaty in a hurry - and these are just his own personal howlers. Add in the twenty-five million personal financial details lost in the post, the Northern Rock fiasco and the multiple thousands of illegal immigrants found working in sensitive areas such as airport security - and last but not least the party funding scandal - and the problems for the government seem irretrievable. If we had a prime minister of real, established credibility and competence heading a catastrophically incompetent government, there might at least be some hope that things could be turned around. Instead, such guidance as there is from the top seems not to be helping: Macavity wishes he was somewhere else.

Michael Portillo asks the question why a politician with such a long track record in the upper echelons of British politics can be putting up such a poor performance:

One answer is that he has the wrong kind of experience. He is highly unusual for having held just one ministerial job before prime minister, that of chancellor of the exchequer. To have held that office alone is the worst possible preparation for the premiership.

A chancellor does well to keep aloof from the consequences "on the ground" of his fiscal decisions. He does not want his judgment of the right level of tax or spending to be clouded by emotional arguments presented by nurses, teachers or pensioners. The chancellor decrees policy, and other departmental ministers are left to deal with what the Treasury calls the "bleeding stumps" - the cataclysmic outcomes regularly predicted by lobby groups...

Before he entered No 10, whenever Brown addressed parliament it was on his terms. By convention no MP interrupts the budget speech. The chancellor faces questions only once a month when the house is sitting, unlike the prime minister, who is grilled weekly. Questions to the chancellor are specific, not general like those addressed to the premier.

Brown could choose which topics to field himself and which to farm out to junior Treasury ministers. If he felt like handling only an arcane matter such as Vat or capital allowances he could do so. House rules confined all follow-up questions to that specific subject.

So Brown has little experience of listening to colleagues, needing to win an argument, engaging in unpopular policy decisions or wrestling with an unfettered Commons.

If he had been party to the painful decisions on Iraq, perhaps he would have been decisive about whether to call an election last autumn. Had he been less aloof, maybe he would have known about the Labour party’s funding scandals and addressed them. With more diverse experience of parliament, he might have developed those self-deprecatory swerves that so often rescued Blair, winning him appreciation even on his darkest days.

If Brown is by nature impatient, nervous, bad-tempered and suspicious, nothing in his political education has helped to smooth the edges. He has developed no camouflages and surprisingly few techniques. There is little sign that he is learning on the job.

The implication of Portillo's argument is that his long experience has not only not prepared him for the top job - it has actually been a hinderance.

Guido Fawkes comments:

However much Brown smiles manically in front of the cameras, the public believe he is a grumpy, defensive, brooding control freak - because after ten years we know the truth. You can't fool all of the people for such a long time. Recognition of his mincing, finger-chewing, snot-eating, greasy haired, foul tempered nature and weird dark ways has broken out of the confines of the Westminster Village and is seeping into a wider popular consciousness. His personal standing is polling at the lowest ever, lower than Blair ever reached.

Brown still clings to his supposed economic competence, although polls post Northern Rock's collapse show that he has, after 15 years, lost Labour's advantage over the Tories on this issue. As the economy slows the imbalances in the economy will become clear to see. Vince Cable and George Osborne need to ensure that the man responsible for those imbalances takes the blame. In good times a prudent finance minister pays down the national debt. Ken Clarke left Gordon Brown an economy in fine fettle, so much so that when Treasury mandarins breathlessly briefed the incoming Gordon Brown on the admirable state of the government's finances in 1997 the charmless Chancellor retorted, "What do we want me to do, write them a f***ing thank you letter?"

Gordon didn't strengthen the economy, he just taxed it and spent like a sailor in port. Taxed it to pay for an increase of 500,000 bureaucrats on the government payroll and an unreformed welfare system which now has millions more solely dependent on the state. A New Deal that failed to cut youth unemployment, a Sure Start system which has done nothing for social mobility and actually weakened families. Brown recklessly mortgaged our children's future taxes to front load a capital spending programme (off the PSBR books) using an Enron-style PFI debt model that will be being paid down for decades. A strong growing economy can carry these policy mistakes, once the public finances weaken they become a heavy burden. Every bankruptcy and every home repossessed this year will be laid at his door. Every over-taxed young couple struggling to save for their first home, every retiree who has seen their pension plundered, every small businessman burdened by red tape should have their anger directed to the ultimate author of their woes, Gordon Brown.

So we have a prime minister who is woefully unprepared for the job he has inherited on the basis of a reputation which was built on sand.  No wonder that things are so bad at the heart of government.  Unless Gordon Brown belatedly discovers an ability to learn from his mistakes, we are in for a rocky ride for the next couple of years.