Gordon Brown is depressed. He thinks there will be nothing he can do as prime minister. Tony Blair has ruined things for Labour with the catastrophe in Iraq and three years in office is the most that Brown can hope for.
That report, given to me by a cabinet minister, provides a fascinating insight into the chancellor’s state of mind. David Cameron will regard it as valuable intelligence because psychological warfare is a vital part of any political strategy. The fact that Brown is already despondent is a weakness that the Tories can exploit.
On the face of it Brown’s low spirits are surprising. In the struggle with Blair things have gone the chancellor’s way. Six months from now the prime minister will be gone. After the tussle in September that forced Blair to set a time frame for his departure, and which threatened to tear Labour apart, the party has settled down.
If at one time many activists wanted Blair out before the May elections in Scotland, Brown seems to accept that it is best for Blair to stay until then, to take the opprobrium for the disastrous results. They will certainly mute the prime minister’s celebrations of 10 years in Downing Street.
The threat from Cameron now looks less potent. So far from taking a commanding lead over Blair’s fag-end administration, the Tories’ opinion poll performance has faltered. The charge that Cameron has no specific policies is damaging him, even though it is the right position for him to maintain this far in advance of the election. Although George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, did well last week in his riposte to Brown’s pre-budget report, the team around the leader is not yet seen as a cabinet-in-waiting.
Surely Brown will have been cheered, too, by Blair’s ritual humiliation in Washington on Thursday. The prime minister stood beside George Bush as the allies’ failures in Iraq were chastised by Congress’s all-party Iraq Study Group. Some of its recommendations — that the United States should engage in the Israel-Palestine peace process and talk to Iran and Syria about Iraq — have been repeatedly urged on Bush by Blair. Yet Bush had rejected the advice of his truest foreign ally.
Brown is lucky that a chapter of the Iraq disaster is closing before he reaches 10 Downing Street. The admissions on both sides of the Atlantic that America is not winning and that a new strategy is needed will free Brown from embarrassment. He can disown the Bush-Blair policy because the official line is that it is not working.
So what can it be that furrows the chancellor’s brow? The trouble is that Iraq has entered the Labour bloodstream. Many of the party’s traditional voters are sickened by the whole debacle. It is the centrepiece of their disillusionment. They cannot believe that all their hopes, nurtured during the long dark years of Thatcherism and then Tory sleaze have ended in this way.
Their Labour government, which came to power to the strains of “Things can only get better”, is mired in an ideological, quasi-imperialist occupation of Iraq. It is now accepted that life is no better for Iraqis today than when they lived under the murderous regime of a barbaric dictator.
The party’s spirit will not easily recover. It would help if the activists were convinced, say, that education had improved. But the figures stubbornly refuse to support such a claim. Lots more money has been spent, but levels of attainment are much the same as before. Labour hearts might soar if at least the National Health Service — which it came to office to “save” — were a great success. But despite higher pay and new investment, its staff are demoralised by targets, deficits and filthy hospitals that kill patients. The opposition is already making hay with proposed accident and emergency closures.
The chancellor’s pre-budget report attempted to paint a better future. More money still would be available for schools, he told us. Within a few hours the analysts had worked the numbers. Brown was recycling announcements and cash. There is to be almost no new funding.
How could there be? It is not news that we have entered a period of stringent limitation on the growth of public spending. It is the inevitable result of five years in which Brown threw prudence to the wind and spent and taxed. If he foresees no room for manoeuvre for himself as prime minister he should not blame Blair. Brown famously keeps his budgets secret from his boss. The boom has been Brown’s and he will reap the bust.
If the money lavished on education and health has produced neither more successful children nor higher morale in hospitals that is not Blair’s fault as much as Brown’s. The chancellor unleashed an avalanche of cash upon services that were unreformed. Blair, the great generalist, would not have understood the need to make the release of money conditional on change. But Brown, the micro-manager, must have grasped the point perfectly. Yet he pressed on.
Even though Brown’s boast of an extra £36 billion for schools is really only £100m of new money, it is interesting that he believes still that the way to get votes is to announce unimaginably huge sums. As our schoolchildren compete increasingly not with each other but with kids from India and China — poor countries with limited infrastructure — the clearer it seems that more capital spending is not the answer to our problems. More impressive was Brown’s announcement that £10m will be spent on intensive work with children who are illiterate.
However, Brown’s political instincts must be taken seriously. Just as the Tories, in every election that they won, re-ran the scare story that Labour would raise taxes, so Brown hopes to win yet again by frightening us that the Conservatives will cut public services. His tactics may be right, although Cameron is Labour’s cleverest opponent in a decade and will not easily be cornered on that charge.
Cameron is a metropolitan politician with a patrician’s concern for the environment. Brown responds to a Scottish working class that is more concerned about how much it costs to drive a car. The chancellor may be as convinced as Cameron that the planet is in danger from global warming. But he clearly does not share the Tory’s view that voters are ready for pain in the interests of reducing carbon emissions. Brown brought Britain to a standstill in 2000 when he sharply increased the price of fuel and provoked lorry drivers into blockading petrol stations. He is scarred by the experience.
Support for greenery rises with income. We must get used to the fact that Labour will generally be less green than the Conservatives because that is not where its votes are. Cameron will need to judge his policies carefully because he, too, relies on many voters who are more worried about the price at the pumps than the temperature of the seas.
Brown was damaged when Sir Nicholas Stern harrumphed out of the Treasury immediately after the pre-budget report. Clearly the author of the seminal climate change report felt short-changed by the chancellor. He had been cold-shouldered and that reminds us of Brown’s enduring difficulty in relating with human beings.
By chance, I recently met a former civil service colleague. One day, seeing the chancellor approaching, she had held open a door for him. Brown swept past without acknowledging her existence, let alone her courtesy. It is puzzling that against his own best interests he routinely behaves so badly.
Taking it all together — Iraq, the low morale of the Labour party and the chancellor’s personality flaws — a hung parliament seems the most likely outcome of the next election, with Labour the largest party.
In that case, Cameron should not be in a hurry to take office. Brown will want to go on governing and Cameron should let him. Minority governments usually come to grief. The electorate will feel cheated that it did not succeed in turfing Labour out. It will be itching for another chance to finish Labour off properly.
If I can foresee that, so can Brown. Now I understand why he is so glum.
