Fix your departure date now, Gordon, and give your legacy a chance
It is time for Gordon Brown to start contemplating leaving Downing Street. But he should only set a date well into the next decade. To get there he needs to consider now how he wants to be remembered. If he does not initiate discussions on his own legacy, he will suffer the fate of one of his two most recent predecessors, namely to be forced out prematurely or humiliated at the polls.
The idea of Mr Brown focusing on what he has achieved in Downing Street after less than 12 months in residence could be dismissed as another sign of the government’s lack of a political compass. Yet in planning his political exit so far in advance, Mr Brown will be seeding his revival and a return in his party’s fortunes prior to him going to the country in 2010.
To rebuild, Gordon Brown needs to recognise two incontrovertible facts: as a political ‘brand’ he is reaching the end of his shelf life; were he to win the next general election it is inconceivable that he would lead Labour into the following one. His goals are simple: extend his shelf life and prepare the ground for handing over to a younger leader after winning the next election. His means to do this are straightforward: show how the country can make good use of his experience and outline what he’ll help his team achieve.
Which is why talk of a legacy by Mr Brown’s few remaining friends in the media is not as potty as it seems (though it should bring a wry smile to Tony Blair given the scorn poured on his own attempts to cement his achievements). Mr Blair’s plans were settled at a meeting in Chequers in April 2006 where he agreed to ‘campaign himself out of office’. The blueprint which Mr Blair approved at this meeting, and which still sits in a box file in the Cabinet Office, provides the basis for Mr Brown’s recovery. Moreover, with time on his side, and no obvious candidate looking to force him from office (unlike Mr Blair), Mr Brown has the opportunity to succeed where Mr Blair failed. But more of that later.
Mr Brown should ask the Cabinet Secretary to retrieve the notes which were prepared for the Chequers discussion. I was lucky enough to be part of the team which presented this document to Mr Blair. At first he viewed these plans as a monarch no doubt regards discussing their own funeral arrangements. But when a politician recog nises their own mortality they can approach issues with genuine zeal (as Bill Clinton did once the Starr Report was behind him).
If Mr Brown were to read the papers, he would see separate plans to cover policy, communications and politics. The policy section trotted through the usual themes of the late Blair period (City Academies, NHS reform, tackling climate change) while also covering hardy New Labour perennials (rebalancing the criminal justice system, a progressive foreign policy and building a strong economy). The communications plan urged Mr Blair to be more open about what he wanted to achieve in office and created riskier platforms to help him do this. The political advice called for a bold reshuffle in May 2006, perhaps offering the final chance of a challenger to Mr Brown to emerge (here the advice fell on deaf ears, with Margaret Beckett rather than David Miliband going to the Foreign Office).
While the word ‘legacy’ did not feature in the document, and the term was in fact loathed by Mr Blair, the strategy was designed to demonstrate one. For Mr Brown to set about achieving his own, he needs a similar plan. As he has discovered in recent weeks, reeling off lists of policies is not working and claiming the Tories are out of touch is no longer plausible. Instead, he needs a theme which the public will respond to. This big idea needs to tackle the only Conservative policy which appears to have any currency with voters (and indeed any rigour), namely the role of the state and what it offers. He needs to approach this issue through a New Labour prism which guarantees fairness, not special favours.
Having made the argument successfully in 1997 to correct historic levels of government underinvestment, Mr Brown now needs to update this approach. Whereas ten years ago Labour convinced the public that government action was the necessary panacea for most problems, they now need more targeted schemes, with a focus on entitlement rather than universality. This is the only way to ensure that those who need help most receive it, and vice versa. These are the ideas which the next generation of New Labour ministers are inspired by.
Mr Brown can plausibly assert that having overseen an expansion in government activity in the Treasury, he is best able to reshape its size with compassion. With the right argument, he would be able to claim that just as President Nixon was the only man trusted by Americans to go to China, so he is the only man to be trusted to refocus and if necessary withdraw the state. If he does not tackle this, the Tories will win this argument by default and offer a far less equitable solution.
The communications plan to make this argument would emphasise one of the government’s most obvious strengths, namely the talented young Cabinet ministers in key departments (who, incidentally, are absolutely clear that they do not want Mr Brown to be forced from office; change his ways, yes; listen to his more level-headed advisers, absolutely; return to a core New Labour message, you bet — but not go). Mr Brown has to move his message on from telling people about the difficult decisions he is making to talk about the problems which he and his able team are solving.
A bolder, more collective approach to communications would tie in nicely with the final piece of the jigsaw: political management. His approach here should be twofold. First, install a senior politician full-time at the heart of the Labour party (Douglas Alexander being the only credible candidate) to rebuild an organisation that was once the lodestar in political campaigning and is now a shadow of its former self. Second, actively encourage a debate about who is going to succeed him. Here he can learn a lesson from Mr Blair, who despite wanting a leadership contest last summer was never able to do the heavy lifting to secure one.
Mr Brown must use his summer reshuffle to make this more explicit. The leading candidates should be given the great offices of state, and the likes of David Miliband, James Purnell and Andy Burnham should be more open about their ambitions (because at the moment Mr Balls, despite being the architect of many of Mr Brown’s problems, is currently making much of the running).
The real legacy for Mr Brown should be a dynamic race to take his job some time after the next general election, with his party still in office offering a progressive agenda for change. It’s a goal that Labour supporters should hope for and which we should all be prepared to help deliver.
Benjamin Wegg-Prosser is an adviser to the Ledbury Group and was director of the strategic communications unit in Downing Street from 2005 to 2007.
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