At the height of the Watergate crisis in the 1970s, two of America’s leading conservatives, William F Buckley and Barry Goldwater, were discussing the political situation. Surveying the headlines about burglary, bugging, pay-offs and impeachment, Goldwater remarked that if he had been shown the front pages 10 years ago, even without knowing the context he would immediately have said, “Dick Nixon is president.”
In much the same way, if an acute observer of Labour party politics had been shown last week’s headlines a decade ago — “Labour paralysed as the poison spreads”, “Blair clings to the wreckage”, “Clarke attack on Brown ‘the deluded control freak’ ” — he would have said at once, “Ah yes, this must be the moment when Gordon Brown attempts a smooth and orderly transfer of power within the government.”
Gordon Brown is Labour’s Richard Nixon. That is not to suggest for an instant that he is a crook — far from it — but he has Nixon’s combination of immense political talent and utter clumsiness. The buttoned-up suit, the mouth slightly agape, the physical awkwardness, the alarming smile which seems to appear from nowhere as if a button marked “smile” has been pressed in his head, the nocturnal brooding on imaginary grievances encouraged by a group of chippy cronies — Brown, like Nixon, suffers from a kind of political Asperger’s syndrome. Intellectually brilliant, he sometimes seems socially barely functional: a little bit . . . odd.
Up until last week these peculiarities were largely hidden from the British public. Stories of his compulsive-obsessive behaviour, his epic rudeness towards colleagues and his pathological resentment of Tony Blair have been doing the rounds for years, but somehow they have never seemed to matter. Brown was the boffin in the Treasury, glimpsed a few times a year, ploughing his way through statistic-laden speeches printed in an immensely large typeface and balanced on piles of heavy tomes.
In fact, this very awkwardness was somehow reassuring when set against the easy charm of the prime minister.
I think of Blair-Brown as one of those toy figures that you can flick over, and no matter how much it rolls around it always pops upright again: Blair’s face grinning on top, Brown’s heavy ballast swelling beneath. Neither man would have been half as effective without the other; together they added up to more than the sum of their separate parts.
Now that relationship, the axis around which British politics has turned for more than a decade, is finished, for ever. At the beginning of the week it looked as though the biggest loser of their bitter public separation was Blair. But by the end of the week there can be no doubt that the real casualty is Brown. Blair’s time at the top was almost over, whatever happened: he has nothing to lose now except his dignity, which in any case is a commodity always in short supply in politics. Brown, on the other hand, desperately needs to inherit the goodwill of a unified party if he is to have any hope of winning the next election.
This is why his behaviour has been little short of insane. We shall no doubt have to await the memoirs of the two men before we can properly reconstruct the cataclysmic meeting which took place on Wednesday. But, however one analyses it, it is clearly Brown who was ranting and demented. At one point he apparently threatened Blair with a second, third and even a fourth “wave” of resignations, for all the world like Osama Bin Laden ordering up cells of suicide bombers from his cave in Tora Bora. It is a measure of Blair’s enfeeblement that he did not simply sack him on the spot, tell him to go to hell and challenge him for the leadership if he dared.
Presumably Brown was gambling that none of this would ever emerge. Here again one sees his autism when it comes to personal relations. News of what had happened was spreading across London within hours, as it was bound to do. It is therefore not his brutality which makes one question Brown’s fitness to become prime minister — brutality can be a necessary quality in a leader — it is his criminal stupidity. And if this is the way he behaves towards the serving prime minister, can one wonder that so many of his junior colleagues, such as Charles Clarke, feel so scarred by their dealings with him, or view the prospect of a Brown premiership with trepidation?
What Brown needed to do this autumn was to treat Blair with the utmost loyalty and consideration, both in public and private. His model should have been Winston Churchill in May 1940, who mounted a magnificent defence of Neville Chamberlain in the Commons which impressed many of those who had previously doubted his judgment. The result was that Churchill was prime minister two days later.
Blair was almost finished anyway after his disastrous performance over the summer. There was no way he could have survived the Labour party conference without laying out a timetable for his departure. Brown should have praised him to the skies at every opportunity. By doing so he would have looked like a statesman and gone a long way towards winning over wavering Blairites.
As it is he has shown the most appalling political ineptitude and has reduced the Labour government to a farcical grotesquerie without precedent in living memory. So much so that, as the reality sinks in, I would put Brown’s chances of succeeding Blair at not much more than 50-50 and his hopes of winning the next general election at substantially less than that.
Clever men and women in the Labour party must surely start to see that it is not only Blair, but Brown as well, who has outstayed his welcome and that the best means of “renewal” (to borrow the Brownites’ favourite word) might be to dispense with the services of both and install some new faces at the top.
As it is, Brown faces a daunting prospect. The British electorate hate being taken for granted. Having been told little more than a year ago that they were electing a prime minister who would serve a “full term”, they may with some justice see last week’s behind-the-scenes shenanigans as an insult to democracy.
And I am afraid there is another aspect to all this which has to be faced. All one seems to have heard for the past week — admittedly I write as an Englishman — is Scottish accents, as Brown’s supporters were deployed across the airwaves: Wednesday’s edition of Newsnight, in particular, was like an episode of the White Heather Club.
Brown was already struggling, in his cack-handed way, to shed the image of a Scottish machine politician and trying to find some way of addressing the English majority. Hence his presumptuous suggestion, back in January, that Remembrance Day should be rebranded as a “celebration of Britishness”.
Today’s Sunday Times poll, showing that a majority of Scottish voters now favour independence, is ominous, not only for the union but also for any Scots MP who aspires to the premiership in Westminster.
And this — this! — is the moment when Brown has chosen to plunge the knife into Blair. A brilliant man, yes, but a flawed one and a strange one and perhaps worst of all — an unlucky one.
