politics
JAMES FORSYTH
When the Tories get complacent, they should think of what Palin has done to Obama
If Labour does dump Gordon Brown before the next election, then each of the three major parties will, this decade, have replaced a leader before he has had a chance to fight a general election. What used to be exceptional has become almost routine. This is a consequence of politics now running in double-time; the speeded-up news cycle means that what used to take years now happens in weeks.
Consider the almost total reversal of Gordon Brown and David Cameron’s political positions since the last conference season. Then Gordon swept all before him, while Cameron had to make a brilliant speech to save his career. Now, it is Brown who is under all the pressure.
Could the tables turn again; could Brown do a Cameron? That near-extinct species, a Labour optimist, might point out that what this magazine said about David Cameron just before the last Tory conference applies to Gordon Brown this year: ‘It may be cruel and unfair, but most people in Westminster believe the election to be lost already, and Mr Cameron to have already failed. He has until 3 p.m. on Wednesday to prove them all wrong.’ But somehow the idea of Gordon rescuing his career with a genius speech just doesn’t seem credible. This is not because set-piece speeches aren’t important any more. For all the talk of this being an age of ‘sofa politics’, on both sides of the Atlantic the last four years have been punctuated by political careers launched (Obama) or saved (Cameron), and in one case both (Palin), by a conference or convention speech. But Brown is an old dog who can’t learn new tricks — witness his rather tragic attempts to adopt the whole walking while talking thing recently. Another problem is that the Brown spin operation is dooming the Prime Minister’s speech in the way that it did the ‘relaunch’. By leaking highlights — in this case a mea culpa for the mistakes that have been made or a reference to the undoubted tragedies that Brown has had to face in his personal life — they drain these moments of much of their impact.
Yet despite all this Brown will survive this conference. Even his most fervent detractors are resigned to the fact that he will be given time to try to relaunch this autumn. His critics worry that the party will put off tell ing Brown to go until it is too late. The time granted to him for his relaunch will extend into a chance to contest the Glenrothes byelection. An opportunity for a New Year fightback will roll into a last chance at the ballot box with the local and European elections in June 2009. Always five more minutes. But by then many will conclude that it is too late to change leader before an election in 2010. In short, they fret that the party will always find an excuse to give Gordon another month or two. Their worries are heightened by the fact that despite there being no improvement in his poll ratings, Brown appears safer now than he was at the beginning of the summer.
The reason this inclination to give Brown more time is so strong is that there is no obvious successor. David Miliband has raised his standard but the party has not rallied to him. One MP who is certain to vote for Miliband told me this week that one shouldn’t expect Miliband to win an actual, post-Brown contest. Equally, Brown is, ironically, protected against the one thing that could realistically force him from Number 10 — a delegation of senior Cabinet ministers telling him to stand down for the good of the party — by the fact that so many of them want his job.
Jack Straw, Alan Johnson and Harriet Harman can all reasonably dream of winning a leadership contest as the unity candidate. But each of them knows that if they are the one to have forced Brown out, the Brownites will do all they can to keep them out of Number 10. The punishment dished out to Ivan Lewis, the text-happy Health Minister, was taken as a warning that the Brownites intend to go down fighting. If anyone had not got the message, the increased visibility of Charlie Whelan and the sidelining of Stephen Carter serve as evidence that the battle-hardened tough guys are back in charge.
The Cabinet not swinging behind Brown but not kicking him out either is ideal for the Tories. The Brownites waging war on their internal enemies is icing on the Tory cake. The public detest divided parties, and Labour can hardly expect the public to get behind Brown when the Cabinet won’t. But every time the Tories get complacent and start dreaming of three-figure majorities they should think of Sarah Palin.
John McCain’s selection of Palin as his running mate has transformed Obama from a political celebrity who could dominate the news agenda at will into someone who is struggling to get a mention; Obama featured in only 22 per cent of stories about the US election last week, according to the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism.
If you are defined by your newness, you will always be vulnerable to the emergence of something newer. In Birmingham the Tories must do what Obama failed to do: put down strong enough policy foundations that they are not vulnerable to a political tremor.
It is not Brown’s speech in Manchester that should worry the Tories (Brown is old news, and the leaks from Team Brown are ensuring that his speech will be so too, even before he delivers it) but the possible thrill of the new. What unites both the Blairites and Brown’s critics on the Left is their anger at Labour’s failure to develop a proper critique of Cameron. If a Labour politician at conference took it to Cameron in the way that Palin took it to Obama at the Republican convention, it would show the Labour party that they can get it if they really want.
But is any Labour MP brave enough to really want it if it means they have to fight their way past Brown’s henchmen? Is anyone prepared to fight and fight again for the party they love? As it is, Labour is following its leader wholeheartedly in one respect: it is dithering its way to defeat.
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