Brown - Back Him, You Fools!
Comment at end
‘Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.’
Euripides
Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)
[And with Labour people who think like this - i.e. NOT A MENTION in his archives of the departure of Tony Blair on June 27th - just a post about the 'new' PM & his cabinet - what chance for a Labour recovery? Anyway, at least the blogger can see the writing on the wall.]
[Pic:Gordon Brown with his right hand man, Ed Balls behind. Watch your back, Gordon!]
11th December, 2007
WHAT?
A LOAD OF BALLS FOR PRIME MINISTER?
I don’t know why I’m urging the Labour party to back their leader. It didn’t work the last time I tried, and that one was worth backing. But if they’d prefer the history books NOT to show that Blair was the exception that proved the rule, they need to pull together and not apart.
On the other hand, if the governing party wants to prove Euripides right - that nothing much has changed in human nature in the last two and a half thousand years - they should just carry on regardless.
Yeah, that’s it, fellas! Another coup - dump Brown - show him who’s boss. He can’t just ignore the people’s party and their pensions and hope to get away with it!
Gordon Brown, the *present prime minister, must have known that his co-conspirators were just as capable of using the knife on him as his creepy followers (under his guiding hand) did on his predecessor. The blood of the late lamented other has been wiped clean now.
Time to give it a dash of fresh Christmas crimson, eh, lads?
A DRAMA OUT OF A CRISIS? It seems, according to John Rentoul in today’s “Independent”, that Peter Hain is upset with Brown and Darling over pensions.Click here to read all of Rentoul’s Independent article at the end of this page.And today I heard a report on BBC Radio 4’s ‘World at One’ with an interesting angle. Someone who lost his company pension, said that he believed, though he admits to having no proof, that Blair wanted to back the pensioners, but was prevented by Brown. (Now why does THAT sound familiar?) Today the chancellor … Darling, that is … (if you believe he acts independently from HIS predecessor - [I DON'T!]) - is holding out against providing the required payout cash for those pensioners who lost out.It certainly comes to something when even some of the ‘Blair killers’, according to Westminster watchers, are wondering if they can possibly resuscitate him.They can’t.So it’s with a touch of schadenfreude that I say, “you were warned.”But if they think they can do another orderly transition to another prime-minister-in-waiting they’re madder than even I thought. The government is visibly short of such material. You’re stuck up to your chins in the Brown stuff, guys. Make the most of it.Don’t make another ‘effing’ ballsup!
WHAT THE PAPERS SAID AT THE WEEKEND LABOUR MISSES BLAIR says The Telegraph(My thoughts on the Telegraph article: It comes to something when a Conservative paper is suggesting Bhat they bring back Blair; especially when they were so relieved to see him go in the first place, leaving the expected hapless, culpability Brown in charge!)Excerpt:
‘The programmes did, however, (Aaronovitch’s - The Blair Years) provide a reminder of what an extraordinary television performer Blair is. Infuriating, but a master at his game.
It is not difficult to imagine the scene at the Blair’s dining table inside their Connaught Square House whenever the subject of Gordon Brown comes up. Every time the PM stumbles into another disaster (HMRC, party donations) I have an image of Tony and Cherie watching the BBC 10pm bulletin and creasing up with laughter.
Still, Peter Oborne has several juicy bits of gossip in his excellent column today (not online yet). Cherie is in line for a peerage from Gordon and rumours swirl around Downing Street that the situation is so bad Brown may ask Alistair Campbell to help out with some advice on presentation.
I wonder whether it is too late to rerun this summer’s Sedgefield by-election with T. Blair as Labour’s candidate? Get him straight back into the Commons. If there was Labour leadership race right now I guarantee he would win. John Reid, Alan Milburn, Charles Clarke - stay by your phones.’
Excerpt from yesterday’s Sunday Times article by Martin Ivens:Real Leadership - Placating or Identifying?
‘On the issue of a narrowly based circle there is grumbling, even outside the ranks of the Blairites. Complaints mount about overcentralisation and delay at No 10. Alistair Darling, the chancellor, a loyalist through and through, has been treated as a puppet at times. It is alleged No 10 briefed against David Miliband, the foreign secretary, at the Labour party conference. On these grounds alone, Clarke might find the prime minister wanting.
And so to the future. Brown hasn’t yet done “the vision thing”. He cannot expect gratitude from the voters for his past achievements. However unfairly, the voters believe steady and stable growth should now be a given.
Despite the knocks, Brown has the allegiance of his party. Labour is Brownite in a way that it was never Blairite. That should prevent him going the way of Major, humbled by his Eurosceptics. But Blair’s achievement was to govern against the instincts of his party but with the grain of aspirational Britain. The prime minister sounds like he wants to placate the middle classes. His predecessor sounded as if he identified with them. There is a world of difference between these two mindsets.’
John Rentoul: Gordon Brown should watch his back
The plotters of the September coup to oust Tony Blair now have their sights set on their new Prime Minister
Published: 9th December 2007
“Disloyal, discourteous and wrong.” That was about as angry as Tony Blair ever got. The man so described was Tom Watson, a junior defence minister in the Government and one of the organisers of the September coup in 2006 that forced Blair to say he would be gone within a year.
Watson was part of a plot by Gordon Brown to drive Blair from office. Brown managed to avoid becoming known as an assassin, just as Blair managed to make it look as if he was “leaving at a time of his own choosing”. But it was a coup; Brown was the author of it and Watson one of the principal plotters.
They conferred beforehand – on the memorable occasion of Watson’s making a detour from his West Bromwich constituency to Fife, Scotland, to deliver a Postman Pat video to Brown’s new baby, Fraser. And Brown could have stopped the plot. He could have quashed the round robin calling on Blair to go, and he could have prevented the synchronised resignations of Watson and six parliamentary private secretaries.
When Brown became Prime Minister, nine months later, several of the participants in the coup were rewarded, although none of them too conspicuously. Watson is now a government whip, as are Wayne David and Mark Tami, two of his fellow resigners. Iain Wright, who also resigned as a PPS but did not sign the round robin, is a junior minister in Yvette Cooper’s Department of Communities and Local Government. And Kevin Brennan, who withdrew his name from the round robin before it was published, is a junior minister in the Department for Children, Schools and Families headed by Ed Balls, Cooper’s husband and Brown’s right-hand person.
Are the plotters happy now? I am told that they are not; that many of them share the sense of disappointment with Brown expressed in parts of the press. Watson himself must be excluded from this. When I spoke to him yesterday, he said that he was “Gordon’s strongest supporter” and firmly believes that the Prime Minister can and will turn things round.
Yet I have been told that some of the signatories of the round robin are so worried about Brown’s prospects that they are bringing forward their plans to organise a leadership campaign for Ed Balls. This is extraordinary. It is not, of course, surprising that they see Balls as Brown’s eventual successor. That has been a privately whispered assumption of many of Brown’s supporters for some time. For some of Brown’s more factional supporters, it is quite natural that, as soon as they have finished with the Blair-Brown struggle, they look ahead to the next internal party contest and to guess that it will be between Balls, Secretary of State for Schools, and David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary.
What has changed, I am told, is that some of the September 2006 plotters have become so frustrated with Brown that they think the Labour Party may have to get a new leader – another one – before the next election. One of them said recently: “Gordon is not the change candidate.” Another was overheard saying that Brown’s people at No 10 “haven’t got a clue”.
It all sounds most improbable. Balls has been a cabinet minister for just six months, and an MP for only two and a half years. Despite a formidable intellect, he has not yet developed a comfortable television manner. But, as was argued in this column last week, if things continue getting worse for Brown, it is possible that the party might turn to David Miliband. That sounds only slightly less improbable, yet it is an indicator of the trouble that Brown is in that MPs are already talking about it. And if the Blairite tendency are prepared to talk up the Foreign Secretary the patterns of recent Labour history ensure an equal and opposite reaction from the Brownites.
One MP, an acid-tongued critic of the September coup, says: “It’s like having an affair: when you’ve done it once, you’ll do it again” – and suggests that some of the plotters are addicted to organising for the sake of it.
It has become fashionable to assume that the House of Commons does not matter much, and that the Parliamentary Labour Party is a pliable tool of the party leader. This is quite untrue: Blair was in effect brought down by a revolt of Labour MPs. But most of the mechanisms by which these things are organised and expressed within the party are hidden from public view.
Other parts of the hidden wiring of the Parliamentary Labour Party were exposed by the deputy leadership election, which Harriet Harman won, thanks in part to discreet support from Gordon Brown. It was a close-run thing. Not just because Harman beat Alan Johnson, now Health Secretary, by only 0.87 per cent on the final count. If five MPs or MEPs had voted differently, she would have lost; and six known Brownites voted for her.
It was close in another sense: because Jon Cruddas, the left-wing insurgent candidate, won the most first preferences and could have come through if the votes had fallen differently, or if he had tempered his oppositionalism by perhaps two degrees during the campaign.
Cruddas remains one of the key players in Labour’s future. Once one of Blair’s loyal organisers, responsible for whipping the union votes at conferences that produced a series of clear runs for the previous leader, he has turned into an anti-capitalist idealist.Last week he wrote an article in the New Statesman that attacked Brown for caving in to the Conservatives by cutting inheritance tax and demanded a party general secretary independent of the leader to get clear of the “toxic” party funding issue.
Cruddas has kept his distance from Brown, refusing a junior ministerial post that was offered because it was “too nebulous”. His left-wing bloc, which is wider than the old Bennite left, could be the deciding factor in a future leadership contest. And Tom Watson was one of the MPs who nominated Cruddas for the deputy leadership.
This is subterranean politics, the geological formations that underlie the visible stuff. I do not know how much Balls knows about what some of his putative supporters are up to. And Watson says there is “no truth whatsoever” in any suggestion that he is involved in a Balls leadership campaign.
The fact that others of the September plotters do seem to be talking about it, though, is important simply for what it says about the mood of the parliamentary party.
If Gordon Brown fails to get out of the trough that he is in, the obvious conclusion would be that Labour could not avert election defeat by changing its leader a second time. Certainly such untested young candidates as Miliband and Balls are not the obvious answer. Not yet; but I suspect things may look very different a year from now.
ENDS INDEPENDENT ARTICLE
And 21st Century Socialism says, whilst quoting a few other luminaries on the same question:What and Who is Gordon Brown For? ‘During Britain’s mini-golden age, Chancellor Gordon Brown could keep most of the people happy, most of the time. But that was then, and it seems that this may no longer be possible. So over the next 18 months, we can expect the following question to lurk behind the usual allegations of scandal and incompetence which are directed at an incumbent prime minister: what, and who, is Gordon Brown for?’
And in The New Statesman, on 6th December
(NOTE: Although I do NOT accept the relative comparison with Blair’s social principles, and I think I will be proved right in the end, this article paints an interesting picture of the innermost fears and confusion at the heart of the parliamentary Labour party.)
Excerpts:
‘At the latest meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, an old soldier urged the utmost discipline on younger MPs, saying that if they thought this was a crisis, they simply hadn’t lived. Sounding every bit the haunted veteran who had seen action in the trenches of the 1970s and 1980s, Gerald Kaufman said the present difficulties were nothing compared to the proper catastrophes he had witnessed: the 1976 IMF crisis, or the 1983 election manifesto, for which Kaufman himself had coined the phrase “the longest suicide note in history”.
His choice of examples from history was revealing.
The implication was that what is happening now is worse than anything encountered under Tony Blair’s premiership.
Let me make it clear: there is no doubt in my mind that Gordon Brown believes passionately in the core left-liberal principles of equality, social justice and opportunity for all. Despite all the vitriol thrown at him by the hostile media over the past weeks this remains the case, more than it ever was for Blair and more than it ever will be for David Cameron.‘Words are no longer enough. Gordon Brown needs to prove he means what he says on equality. Perhaps he should also start listening to Labour MPs, whose loyalty is at breaking point, when they tell him he is wrong. Unlike his predecessor, he could even recognise that sometimes, just sometimes, they might have a point.’
ENDS NEW STATESMAN EXCERPTS
And from Andrew Gimson in the Telegraph on 7th December, a quirky sketch on the forgetfulness of the present PM. “WHO BLAIR?”‘Doubts have been growing about Gordon Brown’s claim to be paddling his own canoe. Neighbours say Mr Brown’s canoe looks suspiciously similar to the canoe once paddled with much greater success by Tony Blair, who vanished six months ago in mysterious circumstances.Mr Brown never talks about Mr Blair and insists he does not remember meeting him, but photographs exist of the two men sharing a platform as recently as the 2005 general election.David Cameron has taken the chance at Prime Minister’s Questions to pour scorn on Mr Brown’s claim to be suffering from amnesia: “I know he wants people to think that, like the man in the canoe, he hasn’t been around for the last five years.”[MY NOTE on the above Gimson article: OK, so they are paddling the Tory canoe, but credit where it is due, the present pm WAS around in ALL th etime blair was PM. In fact they both held their respective posts for the same length of time - ten years. You'd think Mr GB/PM might have noticed SOMEthing in all that time.]
And this blog - Behind The Lines, by Paul Linford asks, in reference to rumours going round even BEFORE the Abrahams affair:Could Gordon Stand Down Before The Next Election?Excerpt:
‘“Two themes dominate. One is the scale of the disaster. The other is whether Gordon Brown will be around long enough to fight the next general election.”
That this subject is even being discussed this early into Mr Brown’s premiership is evidence of the collapse in the Prime Minister’s authority in the weeks since the end of the party conference season.
But the same MPs who just six months ago were content to give the former Chancellor a clear run at the party leadership are now openly starting to question whether he is the right man.’
NOTE: My reference to Brown as - “the present prime minister”. I do not apologise for this description, as it is entirely accurate. Wrong, yes, in that he shouldn’t BE the prime minister, imho, but it’s a fait accompli. And his own crowd of wasters put him there. They now, sadly, need to keep him there.
MEANING OF: “The exception that proves the rule.”
A quick explanation just in case you have never quite got this phrase. Many have puzzled over its exact meaning, since it could be described as a bit ambiguous. It’s of the “Dogs must be carried” sign on the Tube (implying that you can’t go on the Tube if you’re not carrying a dog!)
But in the Blair/Labour context, it means simply this:
That Tony Blair may well turn out to have been the only Labour Leader who managed to keep his crazy partisans together for long enough to win three general elections. After that, of course, they revert to type, and internecine war erupts. Thus he may yet be the exception which ‘proves the rule’ that Labour invariably implodes in the end.
Read this description of the phrase.
Tags: Aaronovitch, ed balls, Gordon Brown, revolting, The Blair Years, Tony Blair
May 11, 2008 at 10:29 pm
[...] to announce his retirement. BUT I have also said here, that they are stuck with their mistake, and should support their leader. Losing one leader is carelessness. Losing two would be folly [...]