There is rich irony in the Blairite assertion, whispered with relish in Manchester this week, that Gordon Brown cannot win a fourth term for Labour. The plain fact is that without the chancellor Labour would already be in opposition. Venting their bitterness over the events of the past month Blair’s supporters accuse Brown of ingratitude and disloyalty. But what are we to make of a prime minister who was all ice creams and smiles when he needed the chancellor to bail him out at the last election and now repays that debt by undermining his leadership prospects at every turn?
Blair has governed for more than a year on a borrowed mandate, and in that time he has used up valuable political oxygen to no good purpose while Brown has suffocated under the weight of his leader’s unpopularity. Polls showing him trailing David Cameron should surprise no one. They are the inevitable result of the vacuum created by Blair’s grim determination to cling to power.
Many of those around Blair now hope to exploit this predicament to the point where Brown is deemed unelectable and the Labour party is forced to turn to one of their favoured candidates. Hence the desperate scramble to create from nothing a candidacy that might succeed in defeating Brown.
Alan Johnson has emerged as the disgruntled Blairites’ great white hope, but he is only a potential leader in the sense that the contestants on Love Island are “celebrities”. He is a respected and competent minister, but he has been in the government for seven years and his public profile is negligible. What would the public think if he leapt from obscurity to Downing Street in one go? They would conclude, quite rightly, that he was there not on the strength of his own merits but because he wasn’t Brown.
The other potential challengers scarcely fare any better. John Reid has had a “good summer” on the anti-terror beat and does not suffer from Johnson’s lack of profile. Yet he loses out to Brown in the national popularity stakes by a margin of between two and five to one. David Miliband, the other candidate frequently mentioned, is a talented and thoughtful minister who may emerge as leader one day. But his relative lack of experience at the highest levels of government means that he cannot today be considered in the same league as Brown. To his credit, Miliband knows this and has ruled himself out of the running.
For all the loose Blairite talk about Brown’s supposed lack of appeal to middle England, a decade of Labour government has failed to produce a single challenger of equivalent stature in the public mind. Indeed, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is his very success in sustaining an independent political profile that lies behind much of the bitterness. As both the opinion polls and his track record in government show, he remains Labour’s greatest asset by far.
Not long ago Labour thought the era of full e mployment and large increases in public expenditure had gone for ever. Brown has restored those ideals, with levels of spending on health and education previously thought impossible. It is an astonishing feat, especially as it has been achieved alongside the longest period of economic stability in decades. Those who question Labour’s debt to its chancellor should reflect on how many of the attainments Blair cited in order to generate a feel good atmosphere for his speech on Tuesday are thanks to Brown — and how few are thanks to his rivals.
Brown is not only Labour’s most successful chancellor he is a more significant figure in his party’s history than some who have led it. The only reason there is now an active campaign to block his path to No 10 is the animosity directed towards him by a handful of senior colleagues.
If Labour is to recover its position in time to win the next election the leadership succession will have to mark a fresh start for all concerned.
A leadership election that became an opportunity for settling scores would prove terminal. Voters want a contest because they hate backroom politics, not because there is public support for the “anyone but Gordon” agenda being touted around Manchester this week.
Parties that spurn leadership favourites for internal reasons unrelated to merit tend to regret such decisions. Labour passed over Denis Healey for Michael Foot in 1980 even though he was far better qualified for the job. The Tories did the same to Michael Heseltine 10 years later in revenge for his role in deposing Margaret Thatcher. Although John Major narrowly won the subsequent election, the end result was the same in both cases: a collapse in support followed by a long spell in opposition.
Labour can avoid that fate, but only if it is willing to put the spite merchants in their place and choose the only candidate with the substance and experience to govern successfully and win the next election. That means uniting behind Gordon Brown.
David Clark is a former Labour government adviser