POLITICS
MATTHEW D’ANCONA
Milburn is mad to think of challenging Brown: but there is method in his madness
When Alan Milburn returned to the Cabinet in September 2004, explicitly tasked to run Labour’s general election campaign, Gordon Brown’s advisers were amazed by the Chancellor’s composed response to such a bloody-minded act of provocation by the Prime Minister. ‘Gordon was very strategic about it,’ one aide recalls. ‘He said Milburn would fall out of favour with the parliamentary party and the activists, and that it would be a shambles.’ The Brownites are nothing if not thorough, however. So a superbly orchestrated campaign of assassination was mounted just to make sure that Mr Brown’s prophecy came true: a campaign that became known around Westminster as ‘Kill Mil’. Barely a day seemed to go by without another allegation about Mr Milburn’s supposed incompetence, sexism or arrogance appearing in the press. By the time Mr Brown had been recalled, and the election won with his help, Mr Milburn had had enough, and resigned from the Cabinet a second time. The welltempered samurai steel of ‘Kill Mil’ had well and truly done its work.
So it was quite something to see Mr Milburn on Sunday AM brooding over his prospects as a challenger for the Labour leadership. As David Blunkett once put it, he who crosses Gordon is asking for ‘glass in his porridge’. And yet there was Mr Milburn talking like a southern governor who has already decided to run for the presidency, has $100 million in campaign pledges, but is not yet ready formally to announce his candidacy. ‘That is a really good question,’ he replied, when asked by Andrew Marr if he would challenge Mr Brown, ‘and it deserves a really, really good answer. The answer is when we have a vacancy. At the moment there isn’t a vacancy. I think personally it is highly unlikely, but that is a bridge that I think we all need to cross.’ The only bridge Mr Brown has in mind for Mr Milburn is the one he would like to throw him off. And as for the ‘really, really good answer’ to Mr Marr’s original question; that, in the Chancellor’s eyes, would be: ‘No, never, I wouldn’t dare, the very thought of challenging Gordon!’ At which point Mr Milburn would have pledged tearful fealty to Big Brown in the manner of the cured Winston Smith.
The fact that he did not suggests to some that Mr Milburn has become addicted to hopeless acts of vengeance, and to the whiff of death that accompanies the lethal sport of Brown-baiting. According to this analysis, the MP for Darlington is in the grip of a psychosis that will see him splattered once more across Whitehall, roadkill under the tartan juggernaut. This may indeed be Mr Milburn’s fate. But it is not inconsistent with such a conclusion about his political life-expectancy to suspect that there is method in his madness. He may be signing his own death warrant. But he may also know what he is doing.
Mr Milburn’s behaviour has shed light on a deep fissure in the collective Blairite psyche. A Downing Street official told me the other day that he was going to have a flutter on Mr Brown failing to become Prime Minister — but only because the odds were so superb. The eventual ascent of Mr Brown to the top job is, and has long been treated as, a given in the Blairite camp. But since last autumn there has been serious division among the Prime Minister’s allies over the best way to handle what they regard as a regrettable inevitability.
The first strategy was road-tested as long ago as July 2004 by Peter Mandelson. In a television interview with Alastair Campbell, he said that when Tony Blair stood down, ‘Gordon Brown will be his New Labour successor.’ Into this apparently straightforward endorsement was built a sneaky condition: the words ‘New Labour’ made clear that Mr Mandelson would accept Mr Brown as prime minister only if he pledged not to unpick Mr Blair’s reforms.
Before last year’s Labour conference, Tessa Jowell, Patricia Hewitt and David Miliband all declared publicly that the job was Gordon’s. Behind the scenes, however, Ms Jowell, John Reid and others have made clear to Mr Brown that their support depends upon him remaining true to the Blairite agenda. For now, they prefer to remain inside the tent: public solidarity, private candour, to borrow the formula the Prime Minister uses in his relationship with the President.
That is not remotely the approach adopted by the so-called ‘outriders’: principally, Mr Milburn and his close friend Stephen Byers. Outside the Cabinet, the two men have defined themselves by their opposition to what they see as the consolidating, antireform instincts of the Chancellor. They have championed ever-greater choice in the public services, the involvement of the private sector in health and education, and decentralisation to the citizen-consumer. John Prescott once dismissed them as ‘these scribblers, the thinkers, and this new group calling themselves outriders, they all do the same thing by criticising and demanding more reform. I think it undermines our record.’ Earlier this month Mr Brown’s spokesman declared that ‘these outriders should stop the briefing, which only serves to damage the Labour party’. This was an ad homines attack, delivered with all the official might of HM Treasury: shut up, you pair of Northern nobodies, unless you want to find yourselves in concrete slippers at the bottom of the Tyne.
Undeterred, the outriders continue to ride: they see themselves as Butch and Sundance facing the Bolivian army. Their philosophy is that ‘somebody has to do it’. Why? There was a clue in Charles Clarke’s recent aside on the Today programme that he expected Gordon Brown to become Labour leader in 2008 after a contest in which the Campaign group of left-wing MPs would put up a candidate by which one assumed he meant Alan Simpson, Member for Nottingham South.
This, of course, would be a walk in the park for Mr Brown. He would be able to present himself valiantly as a centre-ground continuity candidate, quite different from the left-wing dinosaurs of his party who, he would say, do not understand globalisation, the need for reform, and the onward march of New Labour.
A challenge from the Left, in other words, would make it easy for Mr Brown to present himself as the modernisers’ continuity candidate. Asked if he would prefer Mr Simpson or Mr Brown, an ultra-Blairite such as John Reid could scarcely name the former. But between Mr Milburn and Mr Brown? Well, that might be trickier.
If there is a contest, its true purpose will be to put down markers. Everyone knows that — barring an astonishing reversal of fortune — the crown is already Gordon’s. The battle, such as it is, will be to determine the complexion of his leadership, and the constraints within which he operates.
A decent showing for a candidate such as Mr Milburn would send a sharp and public signal to Mr Brown that the Blairites considered him to be on probation. It would show that there were New Labour as well Old Labour doubters. It would also, of course, be a suicide mission. But politics, as Mr Blair himself likes to say, is about hard choices. This time, ‘Mil’ may have to kill himself.
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