From the moment it was clear that Labour was on course for a third election victory, the political class shifted to the real issue: when will Gordon Brown succeed Tony Blair as prime minister? Equally inevitably, attention will turn to what sort of prime minister Brown will make. Will he shift the emphasis from the centre to the centre left, governing from a more traditional Labour stance?
Brown sees his first big task as political renewal. He privately believes the way Britain went to war was a disaster for Labour, sapping its political legitimacy and diverting attention from what was supposed to be the big issue of the past four years — investment in a rejuvenated public sector.
When he was fuming last year over Blair’s failure to stand down, Brown talked openly of Labour’s failure to use its two thumping election victories to change Britain’s zeitgeist. After two terms in office, his argument was that Britain should have moved on from the days of Conservative hegemony, but had failed to effect the necessary social democratic transformation.
For the past year, Brown has been mulling over a blueprint for political renewal. He wants what one of his close circle described as a ”red water” issue, one that would put distance between himself and Blair. There is talk of House of Lords reform, dilution of the royal prerogative, giving Parliament the right to see all the intelligence material before voting on military action, and more focus on development issues.
Style of government
A Cabinet minister, who has watched Blair and Brown closely for 20 years, said: ”Yes, they are different people but they are not chalk and cheese. The idea that, if [Brown] had been prime minister for the past eight years, it would have been different, is not true.”
But Brown is comfortable with the language of Labour in a way that Blair never has been. One aid campaigner cited the example of a meeting in which Brown had noted that the following week he would be the second-busiest person in the country. His mum would be the busiest, he said, because it was Christian Aid week and she would be out door-to-door collecting.
Inner circle
Blair has often been accused of running too tight a ship, with power concentrated in a small band of trusted advisers, but nothing in Brown’s record suggests he would behave any differently. Both as shadow chancellor and then as chancellor, he has relied heavily on an even smaller cabal of advisers than Blair.
Big bang ideas
Although reform of the Lords has been in the manifesto, Blair has been reluctant to move since the abolition of most of the hereditary peers. A minister said Brown has already been talking about an elected chamber. The chancellor is strongly opposed to proportional representation.
Development
As the son of a Church of Scotland minister, Brown was imbued with concern for Africa. A development official said: ”Brown will put it at the centre of things. Blair thinks of it as charity, putting a couple of coins in the box.”
Foreign policy
Brown has been the brake on Blair’s tentative moves to take Britain into the single currency, and would not endanger his own premiership with a divisive euro referendum.
Charles Grant, of the Centre for European Reform, said he had two concerns about a Brown premiership. The first was that Brown sometimes appeared hostile to the European commission. The second was that he had not shown a great interest in the security side of foreign policy, while as prime minister he would have to deal very quickly with issues such as Iran, the Middle East peace process and Russia. He is strongly pro-US.
Defence
One Brown colleague predicted he would not give up Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent: ”It would be a catastrophic loss of influence.”
Economic policy
On the domestic front Peter Robin-son, chief economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research, said the key issue was public spending. Blair, he said, had signalled that the proportion of the economy accounted for by the state would hit a plateau of 42%, but Brown might try to edge it up to 45% to pursue his redistributive aims.
Environment
Environmentalists have accused Labour of lacking a coherent green agenda since 1997, but Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth said that policy could change radically under a Brown premiership. Juniper said he would ”engage more with our issues … and piece them together rather than spreading them apart as Blair has done”.
Public sector reform
Brown has expressed a view common among Labour backbenchers. A colleague said: ”It is about value for money.”
Long-term strategy
Even those Blairites hostile towards Brown acknowledge his ability to think well ahead. One serving minister said Brown was already planning not just for an election in 2009 but for the one in 2013. — Â