TWO ASSUMPTIONS, one right, one wrong. That the victory this time is Gordon Brown’s and not Tony Blair’s, and that power will begin to seep away from the Prime Minister the day after the election.
Mr Blair, goes the theory, has been so sullied by the war in Iraq that he has become an electoral liability. The broken trust has spilt into every corner of this Government, making every claim suspect. The Chancellor has ridden to the rescue of his struggling Prime Minister, propped him up, praised him and won the country back for Labour. Without that intervention, Mr Blair would have struggled to hold on to power.
This is rot. Tony Blair remains Labour’s biggest electoral asset by far. Yes, he struggled at the beginning of the campaign, as you would if you were trying to focus on the economy against the wilful obstruction of the Treasury. And yes, voters have responded well to seeing the two men together on the hustings. But this is because they recognise the strength of the team. Perhaps it even reminds them of some of the successes of this Labour Government.
These are not just Mr Brown’s management of the economy and his creation of a subtly redistributive and gargantuanly complex new system of taxation, benefits and tax credits which has relentlessly targeted money towards the poorest. Future generations will also see 2000-08 as a golden age for the health service; an era of quite astonishing spending increases and an extraordinary opportunity for the NHS which will probably never be repeated. Why that is not sufficient for the Left, which claims the National Health Service as totemic, defeats me. I can only think that they are idiots, and self-centred ones at that.
The achievements are Mr Blair’s at least as much as Mr Brown’s. For that matter, Mr Brown is Mr Blair’s achievement. Remember that. The Prime Minister has kept his Chancellor in office despite the most outrageous provocation. Ignore opinion polls showing Mr Brown’s individual ratings flying above Mr Blair’s. The Chancellor is untested as a leader. People like what they see of him, but compared with Mr Blair, they haven’t seen very much — and familiarity, as we know, breeds its own contempt. After eight years in office and with a third win imminent, of course people want to slap the Prime Minister’s grinning face. This election has been cathartic in that respect. Mr Blair has been slapped. We have seen him sweat.
It is not the Chancellor who is forced to answer on the fine detail of every issue from the correct interpretation of OP12 of UN Resolution 1441 to the death of a woman’s husband in Iraq or a mother’s difficulty getting an appointment with the GP for her son. That is quite a different matter from steering the economy. Not necessarily more difficult, but certainly different.
The Guardian is offering nose pegs to those readers who “would like to vote Labour on May 5 but can only imagine doing so while holding your nose”. These are the Labour supporters who will vote Blair, just, in order to get Brown. The Chancellor is probably already worrying — and if he isn’t, he should be — about how to meet the overblown expectations that the Left has of him, without betraying the consensus of the centre that has kept Labour in power.
It is a consensus that was and is enunciated and represented by Tony Blair, a coalition of the working classes and — crucially, because they pay for everything — of the middle classes too. Mr Blair’s consensuality, too much for the new Brownites, is what has kept the Chancellor on board. The Prime Minister has not retained Mr Brown over the years because he had to for his own good. He did it because he had to for the good of the Government. And yes, there is a difference.
Power will begin to seep away from the Prime Minister, to Mr Brown, the day after the election. In an interview with Robert Crampton in the Times Saturday magazine last weekend, Mr Blair denied that that would happen, explaining: “You’ve got the power of patronage, that’s what keeps a prime minister powerful.” But you don’t have it, not if your end is in sight. It passes to your successor, and here we have a successor all but anointed.
You can already see it happening, among the candidate MPs who plaster Mr Brown and not Mr Blair on their election manifestos, the disillusioned former ministers, the nose-pegged Guardian readers, Robin Cook, Richard Eyre. Some party that is going to be. And it will turn on Mr Brown just as surely as it turned on Mr Blair. Much of the vitriol heaped upon the Prime Minister comes from a clique of people piqued at his lack of personal attention to them. Never underestimate the power of patronage, and the envy and resentment of those who feel excluded from it. Why was Helena invited to drinks at No 10, but I wasn’t? That’s how it goes. And, no matter how they justify it otherwise, that is exactly how Mr Blair’s popularity among much of the political and chattering classes went.
Mr Brown’s premiership will be very different, and much of that will come as a relief. I don’t think Helena and Richard will be a part of it. We shall see a little more ideology, a little less pandering to the more selfish instincts of Middle Britain. And a lot less consensus — the only form of consensus that Mr Brown seems to recognise is one which agrees with him. We know he can manage the economy, but we do not know that he could manage No 10, and the country. He could prove a superb prime minister but the point is, we do not know.
And I will confidently predict this: the country will not be as keen on Mr Brown as it has been on Mr Blair. Labour will not recognise what it has lost until he is gone.
Which is why, despite the myriad irritants of this administration, its fatuous language, its grandiose promises, its aggressive paranoia — why I, along with many others more quietly content with this Government, shall be voting Labour, and Tony Blair, tomorrow. No nose peg required.
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