I cannot believe I am saying this, but Gordon Brown had a remarkable 2008
Judging the Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards is far from an onerous task. There are two splendid lunches, plenty of wine, first-rate gossip and more than a little argument. The deliberations are secret, but I can perhaps share with you an unexpected debate that took place when we were deciding who to name as Politician of the Year. Boris Johnson emerged a clear and deserving winner. But en route, as we pondered our options, another candidate, nominated for serious consideration, was Gordon Brown.
There were a few objections around the table, to put it mildly, mainly along the lines that Mr Brown is a deplorable villain. It is safe to say that the PM would have struggled to command a consensus on the panel. Yet the case for him was irritatingly strong. In the summer, after all, he had been written off by everyone. Discipline in his Cabinet had collapsed so badly that leaks would arrive by text message, in real time, before the meeting was over. Newspapers conducted polls asking if a worse Prime Minister had ever lived. Most concluded not.
Yet this Christmas he stands triumphant, a stout Scot has risen from a furnace that only six months ago threatened to incinerate the entire Labour party. ‘No matter how many gaffes he makes,’ fumed one Cameroon, ‘he still seems to be closing that damn opinion poll gap.’ Bookmakers now consider a spring election the most likely scenario. The Labour benches, which once looked funereal, have sprung to life at Prime Minister’s Questions.
So should 2008 be considered the Year of Gordon Brown? There are Labour MPs who say so — some even offering biblical references about the stone which the builders rejected becoming the cornerstone. Lord Mandelson talks about the Prime Minister as a ‘Moses figure’ leading the British public from recession to a ‘promised land’. This is why Mr Brown’s slip, where he declared he had ‘saved the world’, was epically Freudian. Slip of the tongue or not, it fitted his overall narrative like a glove.
The scale of Mr Brown’s achievement can only be appreciated when considering the extent of his culpability. It was his fractured banking regulatory system which failed; the whole country is paying, and will long pay the price for his decision to expand the economy by trebling the amount of personal debt. His extraordinary self-belief convinced him that he had indeed abolished boom and bust. He believed he had introduced a new era of permanently cheap and easily available credit. He denounced eurozone ministers who warned him it would end in tears. He was utterly wrong.
But at no point has he lost his ability to use the economy as a weapon. Britain was virtually alone in increasing borrowing through the boom years. Yet Brown still managed — somehow — to close down economic debate. Those who crossed him, like Oliver Letwin, were scarred by the savage reprisal. Only foreigners mounted serious criticism (even now, the most bruising attacks come from Berlin rather than Westminster). When his debt bubble burst, he demanded national unity. The Conservatives pointlessly complied.
With the opposition on mute, the PM seized the opportunity instantly to construct his escape plan. He blamed America, copied a German/Swedish bank bailout plan, sold it as his own, then declared he was leading not just Britain but the world. His message may have been nonsense, but it was clear and powerfully delivered — and this, alas, is what matters in politics. All the dazzled Conservatives could do is cry ‘foul’ and wait for it all to implode. Three months on, they are still waiting.
Meanwhile, he built powerful strategic alliances with former sworn enemies, most dramatically with the return of Lord Mandelson. He successfully divided his Blairite opponents, leaving Alan Milburn on the backbenches and giving John Hutton his dream job of Defence Secretary. He assuaged the Left by promising a 45 per cent tax rate for the rich, then nodded to the Blairites by allowing James Purnell to adopt the most radical reform programme the welfare state has seen since its inception. It is the Santa’s Sack approach to politics — dig in and see what you get — and has paid dividends in reducing the Tory lead to one vulnerable point.
Brown’s speciality is and has always been dividing lines. In interviews, he never gives his own position without also giving a caricature of the Tory position — and it often sounds as if the latter is more important. Labour is ‘for education to 18 and the Tories against it’ — the word ‘compulsory’ is omitted. He is for ‘helping people’ and the Tories are the ‘do nothing’ party. The repetition is incredible: he finds a line and sticks to it. As Alastair Campbell used to say, the public only take in a soundbite when Westminster is heartily sick of it.
So Mr Brown’s up-before-dawn energy, his political brutality and sheer shamelessness mean he has earned the recovery in his opinion poll lead. Politics is about economics again, his specialist subject, and he could not be happier. ‘I was born for this moment,’ he said recently — and he meant it. By sheer force of character, he persuaded Britain that borrowing in a boom was the right thing to do. Now he is well on his way to persuading Britain that borrowing its way out of debt is right, too. The world agrees with him. We know because he tells us so.
The only advantage this has brought the Conservatives is to cure them of a disease which had stymied their intellectual development for about a decade: fear of what Gordon Brown might say. For a while, every policy was calculated to restrict the then Chancellor’s ability to counterattack. After three election defeats and three years of Cameron’s leadership, the penny has dropped: he will accuse them of planning cuts no matter what their policy actually is. If necessary, he will simply lie.
‘This is why it’s so difficult to fight him,’ one Cameron strategist told me recently. ‘If we propose to increase spending, he’ll accuse us of cuts as he did last time. It will be a lie, but the media will repeat it like they did last time. Lies are more simple and powerful. So should we play the same game?’ There is a resentment of what they feel is asymmetric warfare. And a growing acceptance that the Tory message is, as yet, not clear enough.
For all Mr Cameron’s admirably clear warnings about Mr Brown’s debt and his ‘economic crimes’, he has no plan to reduce debt by a significant amount. This gives the Prime Minister a brief window in which to call an election. Every month he delays, unemployment will climb higher and the impotence of his so-called stimulus package will become more obvious. While he has always avoided open electoral confrontation, he may have one last surprise next Easter.
Whatever one may think of the man or his mission, there is no denying he has staged an incredible recovery through his formidable political skills. This is why his name was being circulated, along with the port, at the Spectator judging lunch. He did not win because cheating political death does not stand comparison to taking London back for the Conservatives. Yet the Prime Minister should draw solace from this: he came a disconcertingly close second. For a man left for dead by his own party only six months ago, it’s quite an achievement.
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