News from the New Party

From Tony to Phoney

Leadership is a funny old game.  Some individuals, when they get the top job, seem to be the recipients of instant gravitas: calm competence and level-headed wisdom ooze from every pore.  Others sadly appear diminished by the experience: think of Iain Duncan-Smith, or Sir Menzies Campbell.

Our prime minister, having first appeared to find himself in the former category, has now decisively placed himself in the second.  Daniel Finkelstein gives us a clue why:

For Mr Brown to make one grudging reference to Tony Blair in his conference speech was spectacularly rude. I used to write speeches for a living and can spot a formulaic, last-minute paragraph a mile off. "Whoops, we forgot to mention Tony, better stick in something when we mention the Middle East." What a disgrace. This was, after all, the man who led his party out of the wilderness and to three huge election victories. Leaving all politics aside for a second, common courtesy demanded much, much more.

Now you may wonder why a question of manners has got me so exercised. It’s because I believe in a simple rule. If you see a person you know behave unreasonably to someone else, you can bet your last pound that before long he’ll be behaving like that to you.

This gracelessness was not an isolated incident. Alastair Campbell decided that he had better remove any references from his diary that showed Mr Brown in a bad light. There wasn’t much eraser left on the end of his pencil by the time he had finished rubbing out the tales of tears and tantrums. Mr Brown’s obsessive and unreasonable behaviour towards Mr Blair is seen as history by most people. I see it as a glimpse of the future.

The problem with confining Mr Blair to a single sentence of his conference address was not just that it made Mr Brown look small (at least it did to me, the rest of you can speak for yourself). It’s also that it robbed the new Prime Minister of the ability to make a proper argument, to tell a story about Labour’s period in office and its plans.

Gordon Brown (and several of his ministers, for that matter) has indeed made himself look small, and not just by his shabby treatment of Tony Blair.  Brown has indeed robbed himself of the opportunity to "tell a story about Labour's period in office and its plans" - and not just here.  A general election would have provided an ideal chance for the new prime minister to set out his stall - to relay to the British people his great vision for us all.  Instead the government has been expounding that vision in Parliament this week, and quite a sight it was too.  So profound, so expansive is the Brownite vision of our nation's future that it extends even as far as purloining the ideas of the opposition parties.

Brown's comprehensive mauling at the hands of David Cameron on Wednesday was deserved, and inevitable.  Cameron himself, when motivated by righteous, rather than staged, indignation, is a very much more convincing and formidable figure.  His denunciation of Brown as a "phoney" was telling.  Never more than a plodder in the House of Commons, Brown was made to look - made himself look - not just shifty and cynical, but lethargic and unimaginative.  As far as anyone can tell, Brown has no vision for our country worth speaking about.  He has been waiting for thirteen years to be prime minister, and now the job is done: Brown is PM - the only vision left is sustain his premiership as long as possible.  Jonathan Freedland (a Brown supporter) comments:

[I]n an unwelcome reversal of expectations, the past fortnight has shown [Brown] to be weak where he was meant to be strong. He was supposed to be a wizard of political calculus, the grandmaster who could see 10 moves ahead. And yet, by allowing his aides to talk up an election that he then ducked, he checkmated himself. Politicians expect to be buffeted by external, unavoidable events. But Brown threw away an opinion poll lead, along with his hard-won reputation for solidity and strength, through a series of missteps that were entirely of his own making.

Brown's other great asset was said to be his grasp of the big picture. While Tony Blair was the telegenic frontman, Brown was the man of ideas, the widely read intellectual who had studied the past and had spent a decade honing a vision for the future. Yet what was the one quality missing from his speech to the Labour conference? A robust, coherent intellectual case. He did the box-ticking, populist politicking fine. But in the area that should have been his strongest suit - argument - he was found wanting.

The irony of all this is that Tony Blair, for all his faults, is shown by comparison to be the true visionary, a man of greater integrity and valour than his successor can muster even on a good day.  Daniel Finkelstein again:

Gordon Brown is new Labour to his fingertips and as Prime Minister he has demonstrated that - the restless initiatives, the endless political manoeuvring, the search for a third way out of every policy dilemma and the pitch to Middle England.

But by the time he left office Tony Blair had gone beyond this. He realised that third-way compromises were not enough and that reform of public services were necessary. He had grown tired of thinking solely about political manoeuvres and had, too little and too late, begun to think in terms of arguments and legacies. And (I wonder whether he would admit this?) even become a little bit exasperated with Middle England.

The standard view of Mr Blair was that he was good to begin with and then went off. I am of the opposite view. I think the Blair that left office in 2007 was a much better prime minister than the one that walked into the door ten years earlier. I am sure that would be Mr Blair’s view too. He slowly learnt that he hadn’t done enough to reform public services, for instance, and that he would have to try harder. With the incoming ministers I feel we have landed on a snake and slid all the way back to the beginning of Snakes and Ladders.

I know what a lot of my fellow commentators think, though. Who cares about all that stuff - the electorate are just glad not to put up with all that preening and simpering. The consensus appears to be that Mr Brown’s dull solidity is his great asset. I think this an eccentric judgment.

We are asked to believe that emotional intelligence, an attempt to engage and a sense of humour are no longer qualities we look for in a politician. If that is so now, I don’t think it’s a national mood that will last very long.

This view was reinforced when I watched Gordon Brown at his press conference explaining, ludicrously, that he would not have called the election even if the polls had predicted a landslide. There was no Blair self-deprecating joke, no disarming use of the truth to make a clever argument. I hate to admit that I was a sucker for all that. But if I’m going to have my intelligence insulted, I'd at least like it to be done well.

It is hardly a ringing endorsement to claim that Tony Blair was good at insulting the nation's intelligence, but at least he believed in his own propaganda: he deceived himself in the same measure that he deceived the rest of us.  The evidence is that Gordon Brown does not care whether he deceives us, or whether or not we recognise the deception.  Brown is the boss, and there's nothing we can do about it for at least another two years, by which time he expects to have found a way to turn the tables on us again.  A prime minister with no goal other than to keep his job is not a prime minister worth having.  We were far better off with Blair.