COMING SOON to a Labour election campaign near you: disaster. Soon, that is, but not — for the Conservatives — soon enough.

On Wednesday, a man called Bob Shrum announced his retirement. Unless you have an obsessive interest in the minutiae of American politics, it is unlikely that you will have heard of Mr Shrum. He is one of the most renowned speechwriters and political consultants in the business, having worked on eight presidential campaigns. That alone is a record.

His reputation is legendary — so much so that, at the start of each US presidential campaign, the Democrat candidates are said to take part in an informal “Shrum primary”, competing to become his client. The latest winner of that race was John Kerry, who beat John Edwards and Dick Gephardt for his services and brought in Mr Shrum as his closest adviser for last year’s election. Indeed, the only two recent campaigns in which his services were not used were those of 1992 and 1996.

Mr Shrum’s advice comes at a price: he is said to have earned around $5 million for his role on Senator Kerry’s campaign. But the more pertinent cost is not financial. It is that hiring Mr Shrum for a presidential race means that you guarantee — stone cold, nailed on, utterly certain — that you lose.

The two campaigns in which Mr Shrum and his advice were spurned were won by Bill Clinton, who had no time for him. His eight campaigns, beginning with Edmund Muskie and George McGovern and ending with Al Gore and John Kerry, produced a 100 per cent record of failure. Eight from eight, as they put it in America. As the polls refused to budge in Mr Kerry’s favour last year, one of his aides suggested that his staff wear T-shirts with the slogan “Reverse the Curse” over a picture of Mr Shrum.

He made at least one critical misjudgment last year. He told Mr Kerry to go easy on George Bush: all out attack on a wartime President would be a mistake. The Kerry campaign was thus lacklustre from the very start. Oppose the President! But, er, why? The Democratic candidate and his campaign began to spark into life only after Mr Clinton rang, from his hospital room before heart surgery, to criticise Mr Shrum’s advice and urge Mr Kerry to take the gloves off.

To be fair to Mr Shrum, although he holds an unenviable presidential campaign record (it would have ended at the third attempt had he not walked out of the 1976 Carter campaign after ten days), he has had unparalleled success in Senate contests. He was an adviser on 26 winning campaigns and helped to elect about a third of the current Democrat senators.

That is all very well. But unless you are as fascinated as I am by American politics, you might wonder why any of this matters — and especially why it spells disaster for Labour. It matters because of one man: Gordon Brown. Mr Shrum, like many Democrats, has a number of friends on this side of the Atlantic. One of the best is the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

From a technical campaign perspective, Tony Blair’s instincts are unequalled (except perhaps by Harold Wilson). Since the same holds in the US for Mr Clinton, it is little surprise that Mr Blair has strong connections both with the former President and with some of his political strategists. Just as Mr Blair has turned to them for advice, so Gordon Brown, if he does eventually succeed him, will turn to his own friends, and thus almost certainly to Mr Shrum.

The parallels are glaring. Bob Shrum first made his name in 1980 when he wrote Edward Kennedy’s farewell speech at the Democratic National Convention: “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.” Those words live on in the hearts of many Democrats, who still look to Senator Kennedy as the conscience of their party. When Mr Clinton was reducing welfare rolls, Mr Kennedy was acting as the leader of the internal opposition. Yet his campaign was almost a caricature of the unelectable liberal Democratic Party, whose themes and policies spoke only to true believers. Instead of building arguments and policies to reach out, Mr Kennedy’s politics massaged only his own supporters’ political erogenous zones.

Just as Democrats still look to Mr Kennedy as their conscience, so Mr Brown is viewed by Labour Party members as the prince over the water, who one day will take over the crown and govern as the taxing, spending, regulating prime minister that nature always intended; Mr Blair is just a horrible aberration. Soon it will be Gordon.

There is only one problem: eight from eight. That record is not a fluke. It is because, different as our two electorates may be, both evince the same broad dislike of ideological liberals and broad support for pragmatic centre politicians.

Attach the leadership of Mr Blair and the label “new” to Labour, and victory is guaranteed: 1997, 2001 and, soon, 2005. Ditch them, and return to normal: a Labour Party which struggles to win. Welcome to the Shrum curse. How about one from one in 2009, Gordon?

Stephen Pollard is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe.

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