ONE DAY SOON Channel 4 will make a drama documentary called
The Visit in which the prospectively resigned Tom Watson (“Johnny Vegas in fine form”) makes his famous trip to the Broonhoose in Fife in order to kiss babies, hands or whatever else it is that Tom Watson kisses. I’ll be watching because I still can’t quite believe what I’m living through, and any explanation will help.
But let’s quickly get through the back story. Four days earlier, on Thursday August 31, in a day-long plotting session that involved a pub visit sandwiched by two meals, and finished up in a balti house, Mr Watson — then a junior defence minister with time on his hands — and several fed-up fellow MPs decided to write a letter calling for the end of Tony Blair. This shattering epistle would be sent the following week and would, if all went to plan, bring the Prime Minister down.
But before that Mr and Mrs Watson went for a short break in Central Scotland, and on the way back popped into Gordon’s. Where “I dropped a present for the new baby. I saw Gordon, but it was a purely social visit and just stayed for a cup of coffee. I did not discuss any letter and it would have been inappropriate to do so.”
The very next day it was, however, appropriate to send a letter telling the boss (and some newspapers) that it was clear to the signatories “as it is to almost the entire party and the entire country — that without an urgent change in the leadership of the party it becomes less likely that we will win that election”. If Mr Watson didn’t tell Mr Brown what he was just about to do, then the man is one of the most dangerous kinds of friends anyone can have.
And for what was this all done? Mr Blair was going in 2007 anyway, and just about everybody knew it. So the consequence of the Watson attempted coup has been to pull the date forward by about three months, while wreaking fabulous damage on the Labour Party. It’s like having your car crushed so that you can fit into the one available parking space; maybe it’s better to wait a little. It’s noticeable, by the way, that not one woman MP signed the letter; too bloody sensible.
As for the argument, what can you say? The next election doesn’t have to be held till 2010. What on earth was so “urgent” about leadership change? Why would two to three years of Brownism be so insufficient to win round a sceptical public? It smells like panic. It feels like scapegoating. If only Tone goes we can win the Scottish and Welsh elections (which, by the way, have nothing to do with him), stem the Cameroonian tide with new-found clarity and new-found newness, lose three stone and give up smoking.
I can see how, if you don’t think about it, you might be gulled into something like this. So universally expressed is the trendy Blair-hating that you could easily think that he’s the man who persuaded Hezbollah to abduct Israeli soldiers just for jollies. The grey methane fog of political journalism in this country, with its lifeless storms and sterile uniformity, works hard to make us all think the same way, or to make us think that everyone else thinks the same way. What always surprises me, however, is the latent support there is for the proposition that Tony Blair is not the spawn of Satan, and has done a pretty reasonable job.
One thing Mr Blair has failed at though, and it is evidenced in the letter of the unsagacious 17, is to make his party understand that this is yet another moment of political change. My instinct is that Labour MPs are panicking because they don’t any know more what they’re for and they’re desperate to be told. They may sense Britain is moving beyond the more money/less money, more private/less private, more tax/less tax paradigms of 1997 and after. God knows, someone should tell this to the witless dogmatists whose interchangeable whinges have choked the airwaves since the beginning of the TUC this week. Have you heard Simpson, Woodley and all the other trade union leaders piously telling everybody else to shut up for the sake of unity and then mouthing off themselves about how hard done by they all are? Too, too attractive.
It’s a shame these trade union leaders weren’t there to hear Mr Blair talk about the new political landscape. He told a friendly audience on Saturday that today’s issues are demographic change, energy security, climate change, terrorism and the conditions that may help to give rise to it. Yesterday, though smothered by the methane, the Government launched its new policies on social exclusion. But the consequence of Mr Watson’s elementary mistake has been to suck the dead gases away from the question of Mr Blair’s longevity, and attract them to the issue of whether Mr Brown is or isn’t a bit bonkers.
Charles Clarke helped this process, although I don’t imagine for a second that he was acting as part of a Blairite plot “apparently emanating”, as George “Mad-mouth” Mudie, MP, put it, “from the outriders of No 10”. My impression is that Mr Clarke, the former Home Secretary, was driven by pure desperation (and character flaws, of course) into telling the truth as he saw it. His calculation, I imagine, is that it was better to talk about it now, rather than write a post-curry letter about it in a decade’s time.
All the same, the suddenly fashionable view of the Chancellor as an idiot savant — brilliant with figures but unable to eat soup in company — is not my experience. Mr Brown can be funny, a good listener and very open to debate. But something else is clear too, and it was pinpointed by Mr Clarke. When the Watson letter was sent, he said, “Gordon ought — as Chancellor and as putative Prime Minister — to have condemned it from the outset. Why didn’t he?”
That’s what I have wondered all week. And in even wondering it, I sense the answer. I sense it in the knowledge that this article will be labelled as part of a Blairite attack on the Chancellor by his acolytes (many of whose devotions have been, to be fair, unsought) in the press and the Labour Party. They are, whether they know it or not, a terrible bunch of unimaginative bullies. In any case I am, I think, a Milibandite — partly because it sounds like something from the Cretaceous period, and partly because there are two Milibands, and that gives me wriggle room.
Mr Brown has, for some time now, seemed to regard that he is not Prime Minister but only Chancellor, as the product of an unfairness. He feels that he has a grievance that he is somehow entitled to have sorted out. And it just isn’t true. He is entitled to nothing, except for appreciation of his performance as Chancellor (which should, after all, be enough). And the stolid maintenance of this feeling — against the backdrop of a new world and a new Tory party — feels to me like a sheet anchor on Labour’s capacity to change.
Until last Tuesday I put myself undeviating in the camp of those who saw Mr Brown as the inevitable and welcome successor to Mr Blair. But like Tom Watson and his baby clothes, something — a shadow of a doubt — came visiting last week. And, like Tom Watson, it’s something I wish had stayed away.
