Conventional wisdom has it that the last thing David Cameron wants is a change
of Labour leadership. Gordon Brown is grumpy, unpopular and discredited, so
any successor would be harder to beat, or so the argument runs.
I disagree. David Miliband’s egotistical bid to oust the prime minister could
destroy the government’s remaining credibility, which will hardly help
Britain or Labour through the economic crisis. If Brown is dumped, it could
lead to divisions in the Labour party deep enough to exclude it from office
for a decade or more. Whether Brown survives or is knifed by his colleagues,
the Tories stand to gain.
If Miliband succeeds in starting a leadership contest, the public will
conclude that Labour is finished. Resorting to three prime ministers in 15
months looks desperate, however you dress it up. Many Labour MPs may think
that anyone must be better than Brown. If so, they should recall that that
was also their general view when they eased out Tony Blair.
If any of them seriously thought that salvation lay with the foreign
secretary, maybe his behaviour over the past few days has shaken them. His
newspaper article on Wednesday was the most openly disloyal and hostile
attack on a prime minister by a serving senior cabinet minister that I can
recall.
His grinning performances at a press conference, when doorstepped by the media
and on the radio were juvenile. He vacuumed up attention and flattery like a
junkie. His demeanour demonstrated that he is at least unready and perhaps
unsuited for the highest office.
Labour’s present crisis was triggered by losing the Glasgow East by-election.
The government has merely received its come-uppance. It has behaved
cynically towards Scotland. Having granted it autonomy, Labour’s senior
Scottish figures – Brown, Alistair Darling and John Reid – have made their
careers in the Westminster parliament.
The Scottish Labour party has been left to be led by third-raters who have
been trounced by Alex Salmond, the Scottish National party leader. In
Glasgow a Labour party that seems badly out of touch haemorrhaged
working-class support. It would be a paradoxical response, to say the least,
to replace the member for Kirkcaldy as leader with Miliband, a Hampstead
intellectual.
The Labour MP Geraldine Smith called Miliband a nonentity who had been
overpromoted. She was wrong on both counts. His keen intellect made it
inevitable and proper that he should gain high office. But he has risen
because his patrons, Blair and Brown, recognised his talents. He has not
climbed because of public acclaim or support, even though a few callers on a
phone-in programme last week were apparently enough to convince him that he
is the people’s tribune.
Miliband urges change, today the cheapest word in the political lexicon.
Correctly, he analyses that Brown annoys the electorate with his tiresomely
exaggerated claims of past success and his confusion over future direction.
But on a day when the foreign secretary was not otherwise coy, he refused to
identify that way forward.
A year ago Miliband famously predicted that we would soon be yearning for
Blair again. That is certainly not what most of the Labour party feel. They
supported Brown for the leadership, expecting a move away from new Labour.
Tired of Blair’s adulation of wealth and of the United States, they looked
for a fresh commitment to social justice.
They have been deeply disappointed. Brown impoverished the poorest by
abolishing the 10p tax rate and threatened higher duty on their old cars. He
has backed down on attempts to squeeze more money from nondomiciled high
earners.
Now he contemplates whether to use taxpayers’ money to underwrite the banks in
order to shore up house prices for the middle classes. While it is true that
Labour won the last three elections by being new, most of its MPs and the
trade unions (which now have the party in financial hock) want Labour to
move left.
Miliband may aim to replant the new Labour standard (which actually Brown has
not abandoned) but others in the party see in the impending struggle an
opportunity to purge the Blairites from the cabinet, where they are still
massively overrepresented.
Labour has already begun the squabble about whether being too left-wing or too
centrist has brought it down. All parties wage a variant of that fight but
usually it breaks the surface after they have lost, not before.
If Miliband became leader (which scarcely seems possible, given the party’s
revulsion against Blairism), that would not signal the end of Labour’s civil
war but rather its intensification. It is hardly a prospect to make Cameron
shake with fear.
I remember being puzzled when Harold Wilson, on his resignation as prime
minister, said his greatest achievement had been to keep the Labour party
together. The strife of the following two decades made his point. Never
under-estimate Labour’s divisiveness.
Last week Bob Marshall-Andrews, the veteran Labour rebel, called on Brown to
fire the foreign secretary. He is absolutely right, although if Miliband
survives the weekend it may already be too late. Miliband’s office is his
launch pad. Take from him his title and trappings and he would struggle to
make waves, let alone mount a challenge.
It is said that some junior ministers are willing to resign to force a
leadership contest. Then it would be good to remind them now that they risk
being thrown into that outer darkness where there are few perks and little
media attention. In any case, it is no easy matter to organise a cabal
without the ranks breaking. Brown should act now while the cabinet is
scattered around the globe on holiday.
Harold Macmillan once sacked eight of his cabinet in a day. If Brown did the
same it would also, doubtless, be dubbed another Night of the Long Knives.
After last week the prime minister could be excused for getting his revenge
in first.
If, on the other hand, Brown leaves Miliband in place, then the plotters have
all summer to coordinate their tactics. Nor can the government function if
the prime minister and foreign secretary are on “no-speaks” and other
ministers rally to opposing colours.
By not sacking him, the prime minister appears weak and vacillating. Had Blair
dared to dismiss his ever-troublesome chancellor he might still be in power
today and Brown would never have had to prove his inadequacy.
Brown must now take great care. When Margaret Thatcher returned to Westminster
from a summit in Paris, having failed the previous day to win convincingly
against Michael Heseltine’s leadership challenge, she invited her cabinet
ministers to see her one by one. It must have seemed the safest option,
since in full cabinet a bandwagon against her could have been set rolling.
In fact, in such an intimate meeting each minister felt freed from any
suspicion of conspiracy. Thatcher’s friends could then tearfully speak their
minds: that for her own dignity she should resign.
Earlier this year I made a television programme in which some key figures
involved in the recent history of the Conservative party participated. None
was in any doubt that deposing Thatcher had cast a dark shadow over the
party for many years. Chris Patten and Kenneth Clarke, who had been critical
of her and had urged her to quit, both reflected that for the Tory party’s
long-term wellbeing it would have been better had the electorate, rather
than the party, ended her political career.
One participant commented that the television programme itself – appearing
nearly 18 years after the event – had helped at last to clear the poisonous
air.
On that basis, if Miliband succeeds in toppling Brown, Labour can anticipate
almost a generation of feuding. In the short term Cameron may miss the easy
target: his dour and lumbering opponent across the Commons chamber. But if
Labour ruptures once more, then the Conservatives could look forward not
just to an election win but also to another era of political supremacy.
Martin Ivens is away
