POLITICS

Many on the Labour front bench loathe the Chancellor; the trouble is, it's the shadow Chancellor

PETER OBORNE

It had to happen sooner or later. But most of us thought that it would wait till after the General Election. Labour's shad- ow cabinet is at war with itself.

Behind Labour's glittering façade of unity a bitter battle is being fought out between Mr Gordon Brown, the shadow Chancellor and the shadow Foreign Secre- tary, Mr Robin Cook. Neither party has yet blasted the other publicly. But behind the scenes at Westminster, in the lobbies and in the privacy of the shadow Cabinet room, a high-level whispering campaign is under way. Mr Cook or Mr Cook's supporters, which comes down to much the same thing, are privately accusing the shadow Chancel- lor of arrogance, abuse of power and hav- ing a hidden agenda to lose Labour the next election.

In common with many modern political feuds, the loathing between the two men (like the Prince and Princess of Wales, they can barely stand the sight of one another) dates back to university days at Edinburgh. Mr Cook is five years older than Mr Brown, and he found it an unpleasant shock when whippersnapper Brown, then a teenage prodigy of William Hague dimensions, sud- denly emerged on the scene. Mr Cook has been receiving unpleasant shocks from Mr Brown ever since, perhaps most painfully in 1986 when he lost his shadow Cabinet seat the same year that young Brown won his for the first time.

But the immediate origin of the latest row lies in economic policy. Mr Cook thinks that economics is his preserve. He regards Mr Brown as an economic lightweight. His supporters insist that it is a travesty that Mr Brown, not Mr Cook, is Chancellor. In last year's shadow Cabinet reshuffle, Mr Cook fought to keep his trade portfolio and only with the deepest reluc- tance was shuffled off to foreign affairs.

All of this came to a head two weeks ago when Mr Brown launched a new plan to force the under-25s back to work. It was a bold scheme, designed to outflank the Tories from the Right, and it worked. But it left Labour in even worse disarray than the Tories. For the following day the Guardian carried a front-page story quoting a senior shadow Cabinet member claiming that Mr Brown's proposals broke with Labour Party policy.

The leak told us much about the tensions beneath the Labour front bench's shallow unity. It infuriated Mr Tony Blair's office. Some shadow cabinet figures believe that Mr Cook placed the leak. Mr Cook denies it. But it suited his purposes.

Mr Cook launched an open attack on Mr Brown when Labour's shadow Cabinet met the following week. So bitter was the dis- cussion that, as the meeting ended, Mr Blair ordered a news blackout. Within days, in open defiance of the Labour leader, ver- sions of the meeting were circulating around Westminster. According to one, five shadow Cabinet members had joined the assault, leaving Mr Brown wounded. What is certain is that after the meeting three Cook allies, Miss Mo Mowlam, Mr Chris Smith and Mr Frank Dobson demanded a private meeting with Mr Blair to press home their complaint.

Mr Brown presented his shadow Cabinet enemies with a fresh opportunity to maul him over the weekend, when, in a pre-emp- tive strike on Mr Kenneth Clarke's Budget, he proposed a 10p basic rate of tax. For the second time in a week, a Brown initiative was sabotaged, with allegations that the shadow Chancellor was out of control.

If matters are at this pass already, what will it be like if Labour wins the next elec- tion? If Mr Blair was Harold Wilson, he would love it. Wilson used to egg on his lieutenants against one another because it made his own position more secure. But the open warfare that now seems inevitable between Chancellor Brown and Foreign Secretary Cook will dwarf any of the petty Cabinet squabbles that Harold Wilson loved to stimulate. Their feud is on a momentous scale, analogous to the great divide that split Aneurin Bevan and Hugh Gaitskell in opposition in the 1950s after Bevan resigned from the Attlee Cabinet in protest at Gaitskell's Budget.

And in the prelude to the election the row — with its leaks, whispers and innuen- do — has the potential to do immense damage to Labour. Even if it is driven by `I'm hoping to join the police.' personality clashes more than policy dis- agreements, it is far more damaging than the dribble of hostile criticism from disaf- fected Labour backbenchers that desta- bilised Mr Blair over the summer.

Cook v. Brown has sensationally altered the architecture of high Labour politics. Before the latest explosion there was a lazy tendency to divide the shadow Cabinet between Blairite modernisers like Mr Brown and oldies like Mr Frank Dobson. That was too facile. Now the modernisers are ranged against one another. Mr Smith and Miss Mowlam back Mr Cook. So does hoary old Mr Tom Clarke.

Mr Brown's enemies have one clear objective: to drive a rift between him and the leader. They will probably fail. For all the difficulties that followed John Smith's death and the leadership contest, Mr Brown remains the closest senior ally the Labour leader has got. Apart from his eco- nomic portfolio which he has used with brilliant effect to discredit privatisation through the fat-cat campaign, Mr Brown runs the committees that decide day-to-day strategy and determine General Election planning.

Labour spin-doctors spin a blissful tale of the four big men driving Labour forward to the General Election: Mr Blair, Mr Cook, Mr Prescott and Mr Brown. In practice, there is, if anything, a big three. They are Mr Blair, Mr Donald Dewar and Mr Brown, assisted by Mr Peter Mandelson and Mr Alastair Campbell. Mr Cook has been sidelined by his former university junior, while Mr Prescott is out in the provinces banging the drum.

The bitter attacks on Mr Brown are driv- en partly by resentment at the power he wields, fuelled by past animosities. But there is more to it than that. Attacking Mr Brown has become a handy way of getting at Mr Blair. He has taken over from Mr Mandelson the role of lightning conductor for those secretly critical of the Labour leader.

If the Tory party machine were even half awake, all this would be a gift. It could point to a chasm in Labour's ranks quite as large as any in the Tory Cabinet these last five years. But, fortunately for Labour, the Tory machine isn't awake.

Peter Obome is political correspondent of the London Evening Standard.