When Harold Wilson resigned suddenly, putting James Callaghan into No 10, the cover of Private Eye showed a speech bubble: “You take it from here, Jim.” It came from the bridge of a ship that had sunk so low that little below the funnels was visible. As the Labour party assembles in Manchester for its conference, Gordon Brown must doubt whether the vessel he will take over from Tony Blair is any more likely to make it to port.
True, Blair bequeaths a stronger electoral position than Wilson did. Labour retains a comfortable majority of 69 over all other parties (excluding Sinn Fein MPs who do not attend, and office holders who do not vote). It leads the Tories by a massive 157 seats. There are few examples of a government losing power from such a dominant position. But last year Labour’s share of the vote shrank to a little over 36%, a disaster masked by the oddities of our electoral system.
In his conference speech Blair can look back on a decade of economic prosperity. He has brought peace, if not yet home rule, to Northern Ireland. He has implemented many of Labour’s pet projects, such as the minimum wage. But if he were honest, he could report only mediocre performance in education, health and the battle against crime. His foreign policy has plunged his party into feuding and chaos.
Still, Labour may already have passed through its most manic period. Blair cannot delay announcing his resignation beyond May. It is unlikely that Brown can be stopped from succeeding him. Even if the next few months are volcanic he should be in post three years before the last possible date for the next election. Once Blair steps down he will be too busy to be around parliament much and will not contest the general election, so there will be no figurehead to rally dissent against the new prime minister.
Brown might still prefer Blair to leave earlier. The cash for peerages affair has warmed up again with the arrest of Sir Christopher Evans, who lent money to Labour, and the questioning by police of a senior party official. If the scandal engulfs Blair it will do Labour damage. But the change of prime minister will partly purge past misconduct.
After that, politics will boil down to this question. Do voters dare to replace Labour, which looks clapped out, headed by a dour but experienced leader, with David Cameron, who is charismatic and new but perhaps a risky choice? A poll last week suggests that they would dare, but there is a long way to go. Given at least two years before the election, Brown must work on appearing friendlier and Cameron needs to prove that he has really changed his party.
Brown’s problem is that Labour has lost its air of invincibility. In the three elections that Blair fought as leader, there was never serious doubt that he would win. Despite a few wobbles, much the same was true of Margaret Thatcher’s three victories. A successful government dissolves parliament every four years, taking elections in its stride with the easy rhythm of a hurdler. The chancellor cannot hope to be in that position.
At each election since 1997 Labour’s share of the poll has declined and last year was just three points ahead of the Conservatives. Governments rarely manage to increase their share of the vote. So it is doubtful whether Labour can win a majority next time.
A website called Electoral Calculus has factored in the results of the opinion polls taken between July 7 and August 24. If those results were reproduced uniformly at a general election the Tories with just over 37% would win 287 seats, Labour with 32% would secure 280 and the Liberal Democrats’ score of nearly 21% would leave them with 50.
It would be an intriguing outcome. The Lib Dems would be in a position to put either of the other parties into power. Brown would probably refuse to resign, like Edward Heath who found himself without a majority after the February 1974 election. He would remain in Downing Street hoping to make a deal. He could offer to make Sir Menzies Campbell foreign secretary. It would be an alluring invitation, because if one thing emerged from the Lib Dem conference it is that Campbell is eligible for a free bus pass. It would be now or never for him, and an achievement to be the first Liberal to hold cabinet office since 1945.
The Lib Dems would feel much more comfortable sharing power with Labour (as they do already in Scotland) than with the Tories. The conference vote to tax the rich more on capital gains and subsidise their pensions less leaves the Lib Dems to the left of Brown.
Should Campbell hold out for a higher price? A predecessor, Paddy Ashdown, thought Blair had promised him to introduce proportional representation. (Once, Blair could get anyone to believe anything.) As it turned out, Blair won a landslide victory in 1997 and was hardly in a position to persuade his party to change to a system that would make it impossible ever to win an overall majority again.
The prospect of PR would be unattractive to Brown. The present electoral system massively favours Labour. If the two main parties scored an identical share of the popular vote, Labour would have 90 more seats than the Tories.
Perhaps then Cameron would be happier to offer Campbell both a cabinet seat and PR. Certainly, he knows that mere tinkering with the present system will not redress the Tories’ disadvantage. For example, the current spate of boundary changes notionally gives the Conservatives just 12 extra seats and takes five from Labour. However, the Tory leader could hardly agree to PR since that would deny his party any chance of a future majority, in a world where neither the Labour nor the Lib Dem party is willing to share power with the Conservatives.
So Campbell would have to accept that once more PR was not on offer. That would not be his only problem. If he kept Labour in office on the Electoral Calculus scenario he would be propping up a government that had sustained a moral defeat, trailing the Tories by five points at the polls. Campbell could argue that the two parties in the coalition had 53% between them, but the public might still feel duped, and look forward to revenge against both parties.
There is a wide range of plausible results that would produce a hung parliament next time. For example, if the Tories managed to win 40%, any score for Labour between 28% and 37% could deny Cameron a majority. Translating the average of opinion polls since Cameron became leader into a result, Labour would secure 320 seats (six short of an absolute majority) against the Tories’ 272. But taking the polls from the first three weeks of September only, the Tories would emerge with 306 constituencies and Labour just 284.
In either case the Lib Dems would be down to 26 or 27 seats. Unless Campbell pushes up his party’s ratings by several points he may not have enough seats on offer to make either Labour or the Conservatives secure in office.
Generally, when a party ditches its leader it assumes optimistically that somehow someone better will materialise from the leadership contest. For the Tories that optimism was justified on two occasions, when they got Thatcher and Cameron. But this time Labour knows what it will get — Brown — and knows that in opinion polls he fares poorly against Cameron. Anything can happen but there is no reasonable hope that Brown will be able to reverse the downward trend in Labour support.
It is a dismal prospect for Labour conference. May I suggest that Brown could end his speech with a rousing last line? “Go forth, and prepare to share in government.”
