Gordon Brown has been a great Chancellor. So he deserves to be the next Prime Minister. It sounds logical, doesn’t it? And it is an argument that many in the Labour Party now take for granted. But it could do with a certain amount of disentangling. Let’s set aside for the moment arguments over how great a Chancellor he has been. Whether or not he has been a success (and, with a few reservations, I believe he has), the qualities that make for a good Chancellor are very different from those that make for a good Prime Minister. And as Charles Clarke made clear last week, Brown’s character is less well suited for No 10 than it is for No 11.
A chancellor needs to have a challenging mind, a robust intellect, a good head for figures and a strategic brain. All these Brown possesses in good measure. A prime minister, however, needs much more besides. First, he needs to be able to get on with people. He needs the support of his party, his MPs, his ministers, his officials and his Cabinet. All these relationships need to be nurtured, which often means being nice to people you despise or dislike. It means trusting your ministers enough to let them have a degree of independence. You need also to get on with others in senior positions: fellow prime ministers and presidents, captains of industry, bishops, judges and generals. Schmoozing, in other words, is one of the principal jobs of the prime minister.
Then, of course, you have to charm voters too. That means feeling at ease in the company of “ordinary” people, chatting as comfortably with the hospital porter as with the top surgeon. It means coming across on radio and TV as an engaging human being, in touch with the preoccupations of voters and able to persuade them that you are doing your best to address their concerns.
They don’t have to like you, but it helps. They must respect you, trust you and believe in your competence and your motives. If you inspire them, so much the better — though since 1997, they may feel they have had a surfeit of unfulfilled inspiration. What you must be able to do, at the least, is tell them a plausible story about yourself and your plans for their country.
A high threshold of boredom is another prerequisite. You have to sit through endless meetings on any subject without betraying a moment’s ennui. Sometimes you have to put a lot of personal effort into, for instance, sorting out asylum applications or banging heads together in Northern Ireland, when you may not have the least interest.
To be a successful prime minister, you need to have a wide coterie of advisers, not all of whom will agree with you. Indeed, you need actively to encourage them to tell you when you are going wrong. Tony Blair used to be ridiculed when he asked visitors to No 10: “How am I doing?” But it was actually a wise move. Even if only one in two was candid, that was still useful intelligence. His aides have never held back from telling him home truths, and he has never punished them for doing it.
So how does Brown score on these characteristics? Not all that well, on past reckoning. Getting on with people is hardly his forte. Although he has loyal friends, he has as many sworn enemies. He is impatient with people he doesn’t rate (a well-worn Brown expression) and bears long and bitter grudges against those he believes have crossed him, or even disagreed with him. I can’t see him as a good, empathetic manager of his party, his MPs or his ministers.
As for schmoozing dignitaries, he will be fine with those he rates, but gruff and impatient with those he doesn’t. With voters, he displays awkwardness, and on TV and radio, he comes over as a human bulldozer, flattening all before him. Lightness of touch and humour seem to elude him in public.
As for boredom, Brown is notorious for his low threshold. When pressed for decisions on areas he finds tedious, he procrastinates. In his current job, he has the luxury of immersing himself in areas that interest him; as Prime Minister, that luxury would be denied him. Can you really imagine him spending hours in patient negotiation with Northern Ireland irreconcilables, or days flying round the world trying to persuade other heads of government to sign up to UN resolutions? Finally, there is the question of his closed-mindedness and that of his circle. When I once suggested to Brown’s closest aide that the Chancellor might do better to wait until the applause had subsided during his conference speech before ploughing on — not least so that he could be better heard — I was shocked by the ferocity of the aide’s response. If this is the way Brown and his entourage deal with trivial well-intentioned criticism, you can imagine how they explode at anything more significant.
I once wrote that I couldn’t understand why Brown wanted to be Prime Minister given that, as Chancellor, he did all the things he enjoyed, while avoiding the dross that comes with being Prime Minister. I am still puzzled. Perhaps self-knowledge isn’t a trait that comes easily to politicians.
Women’s virtues are trampled over
Women at Westminster have been struck particularly by two facts that have come out of the past week. Look at the 15 plotters who signed the letter asking Blair to go: all but one were men. Add Charles Clarke, Gordon Brown, Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn, who have been stirring things up: all men. Then look at the photogallery of potential Labour leaders after Blair: all men. Meanwhile, who was calling for calm? Ruth Kelly, Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt. This must tell us something about our political culture. Do women rate loyalty more highly? Don’t men care about the damage they do when they plot against each other? Or do they simply take leave of their senses more easily once the testosterone floods in? It seems, depressingly, that we are doomed to more of the same under another male leader. Women’s classic virtues — being conciliatory, seeking consensus, trying not to offend — don’t get rewarded in politics. Instead, Brown has been criticised for not having the balls to finish Blair off. I can’t believe I am alone in finding the values that underlie such a criticism repellent.
A wrong turn
After a recent nationwide police crackdown for a day, it turned out that nearly 30 per cent of the 6,000 vehicles stopped were being illegally driven: either uninsured, untaxed, unregistered or unroadworthy. The percentage has more than doubled in just two years.
All this has happened as speed cameras have been breeding like fruitflies and the number of traffic police patrols has fallen. Could there possibly be any connection?
