It’s become commonplace to declare that Gordon Brown lacks the skills of the modern politician, starting with an easy knack for fluent, telegenic communication.
That’s true enough: Brown may not be blessed with the new-fangled techniques of politics. But he is gifted with all the old ones. When it comes to the brute business of machine politics, especially the crushing of internal dissent, he is a master.
In committee room 14 of the House of Commons this week, his enemies were served a reminder. In the plotters’ schemes, the long-arranged meeting of the parliamentary Labour Party was to be the moment of confrontation, the turning point in the conspiracy to unseat the prime minister.
Last week’s Cabinet resignations, the calamitous European election results — it would all come to a climax.
But Brown survived the packed meeting of the parliamentary Labour Party, which greeted him with a cheer and a ritual banging of desks. For now.
The backbench conspirators were not able to taunt the prime minister with a petition bearing 70 signatories demanding his head, just as former work and pensions secretary James Purnell’s resignation last week did not trigger a Cabinet rush for the exits.
The anticipated chorus of Labour grandees telling him to his face “In the name of God, go” fell mute.
Instead, only known rebels told him to quit, to no applause. Heavyweights such as the former ministers David Blunkett and Margaret Beckett did attack, but aimed their fire at the rebels. The plot fizzled.
The plotters bear a large part of the blame. They took on a master tactician and organiser, a man who has the Labour rulebook engraved on the inside of his eyelids, and failed to organise.
Purnell’s resignation last week was not coordinated — it was a lone stand, designed to be free of the taint of conspiracy. The other resignations were sui generis, easy to explain away as the product of personal factors that did not amount to a collective vote of no confidence in the prime minister.
Above all, the plot to replace Brown lacked two essentials: an alternative candidate and an alternative programme. Had there been a coherent policy manifesto, the anti-Brownites might have broken free of the Blairite circle and won over key MPs and factions. They might have persuaded a trade union leader to break ranks and call on Brown to go.
Instead the brothers held their tongues. Not out of any great loyalty, I’m told: “They’re as lost as everyone else, unsure what to do,” said one influential party figure.
But it was not just the weakness of Brown’s enemies that saved him. The prime minister’s own resilience coupled with his facility in the low politics of survival counted too.
With a kind of desperate genius, he carried out a reshuffle that was ugly, but which did the job, binding in those ministers who could have destroyed him — from Lord Peter Mandelson downwards.
He then let his allies craft an argument that deterred any waverers from joining the plotters’ ranks: if Labour ditched its leader now, the demand for an immediate election would be irresistible.
That was enough to scare off most would-be rebels. After Sunday’s European results it petrified the rest. The wipeout exceeded even the direst predictions.
Most Labourites knew they were going to take a pounding, but none expected a result so bad. A share of the vote below 16%; third place behind the Eurosceptic UK Independence Party; losing Wales, the cradle of the Labour movement, for the first time since 1931, and to the Tories; fifth in the south-west and south-east of England, with percentages in the single digits.
Now you’ve seen the voters’ verdict, the Brownites said to their fellow MPs, why the hurry to face them again?
So Brown has bought himself time. “He lives to limp on,” one former minister texted from inside this week’s meeting. “He staggers on, weakened,” agreed another Labour luminary.
But no one pretends the threat has gone. Some suspect the anti-Brownites might keep up the Chinese water torture of round-robins and resignations, a drip-drip erosion of the prime minister’s authority. Others wonder if they will now retreat, only to re-emerge, better prepared, in time for Labour’s party conference later this year.
Even Brown’s closest Cabinet allies now say he only has a matter of months to turn things around. If, by autumn, he can point to early signs of economic recovery, clean up the parliamentary expenses mess and make a coherent, ideological case for Labour, amounting to a defence of the progressive role of the state — then, they say, he will survive and fight the next general election.
If he cannot, he will face another coup attempt – one that even he, with all his years of bloody experience, may not be able to resist. —