The clunking fist.
When Gordon Brown finally ascended to the job he had so coveted just over twelve months ago, I suspect that most of us, or at least those of us who had regarded Tony Blair for his last few years in office with the same sort of respect as we do a dead skunk, didn't possibly think that things could get worse, or indeed, that the odds were good that such forgotten little things as honesty and accountability would improve, with there was also likely to be less pompous and sanctimonious grandstanding.For the first couple of months, over Brown's so-called honeymoon period, this actually seemed to be happening. Announcements were being made to the Commons rather than to the press; the cabinet was meeting regularly and debate within it was actually encouraged; and even if a little underwhelming, with some finding it rather sad, Brown's pledge to "do his utmost" as he stood in Downing Street surrounded by cameras felt authentic, compared to all the flannel that we had been used to from Blair.
All of this evaporated in one ill-fated, ignorant decision: not to call off the election after Brown had Grand Old Duke of York style marched his troops to the top of the hill, but to instead go and visit the actual troops in Basra during the Tory party conference, and also to pledge that some of them would be shortly returning home. This understandably on the part of the Conservatives caused widespread anger; not just to be upstaging them, which could be forgiven, but to be playing politics with the armed forces and their loved ones back home for short-term possible gain. Ever since then Brown has floundered.
If this had happened to Blair it would have been forgotten swiftly. Blair could do almost anything, whether it be his overall responsibility for the death of Dr David Kelly because his spin doctor, knowing that the BBC potentially had information which could critically damage both him and his boss, went completely over-the-top in his quest to prove the allegations of sexing up were untrue, or being interviewed by the police over the loans for peerages scandal on the same day on which his press and ministerial team were doing their best to bury it, as his ever loyal attorney general walked over to the House of Lords and announced that the SFO were abandoning the corruption inquiry to the Al-Yamanah weapons deal between BAE and the Saudis, and despite being covered in the proverbial, he still emerged smelling of roses. I suspect that Blair would never have inspired such visceral loathing if he had ever betrayed signs of vulnerability, admitted that he had got something wrong or even if anyone ever laid a real glove on him in a political sense; but they didn't.
Gordon Brown, on the other hand, as others have mentioned, seems to have at the moment the reverse Midas touch. Everything he goes near doesn't turn into gold; it turns into excrement. Take yesterday, in the Commons on the last day of the parliamentary year, where you'd expect both he and the opposition to be de-mob happy. What's more, he had some sort of good news to report. Having just visited Basra again, this time, thanks mainly to the continuing ceasefire of Sadr's Mahdi army after a brief uprising earlier in the year, the city's security has vastly improved, meaning that even though the remaining British troops there are on "overwatch", training the Iraqi army, all troops might now be out, or all but a very minor force, by 2010, with the majority out early next year. We can quibble that we should have never gone in in the first place, that they ought to have been out long ago, and that all Brown is doing is in reality waiting until we find out who the next US president is going to be and what his plans are, but it's possibly the beginning of the end rather than the end of the beginning.
Cameron though, understandably, stands up and raises the point that Brown's posturing last autumn wasn't really fit behaviour from a prime minister. Mark Lancaster, who's served with the TA, went so far as to ask for an apology. Brown's response? He accused the Conservatives of playing politics with the armed forces.
Doubtless, Blair would have done pretty much the same thing in Brown's position. He however would have done it nimbly; Brown's problem is that he has the same sense of subtlety as Jodie Marsh has in the clothes department. Blair called him the clunking fist, and he is, there's no doubt about that. But it's in the truly literal sense, in that you can see him making his move a mile off, and he does in it such a blundering, clumsy manner that it doesn't just offend for a moment before it's forgotten, it sticks in the memory. Tony Blair had chutzpah in spades, but always got away with it. Brown's chutzpah leaves him not looking vulnerable, but looking like both a knave and a fool.
Again, you could perhaps even forgive this if Brown had kept his promises on honesty and accountability, but as the problems have mounted up, this too has been quickly forgotten. You can put a certain amount of blame on the media hysteria over knife crime, but last week's fiasco with Jacqui Smith going round the studios announcing that youths were to be taken into hospitals to see victims, only to deny this was the case a day later when they suddenly realised it wasn't a very good idea and that the presentation in any case was hopeless, was a case in point. That however compared to yesterday's rushing out of 30 end-of-term statements, which can only be described as burying them as even when the newspapers aren't busy they hardly bother to report the happenings at Westminster. Of those rushed out, 10 were prime ministerial statements, a direct breach of the ministerial code, which just incidentally, is enforced by... the prime minister.
Even allowing for the fact that some things are forgotten and may not have genuinely been ready to be announced until yesterday, this is surely cynicism of the highest order. It's not also if this has only occurred this year; last term there were 27 statements on the last day of parliament. The number in Blair's final full year of office? 17.
While this is clearly not on the same level as Blair's attempt to bury his meeting with Inspector Knacker, it was that we had come to expect it from the king of spin. From Brown, some of us naively thought that things would be different. Perhaps again though the biggest failure is that Brown's spin, when he's attempted it, has been dire. Alastair Campbell may have deeply distorted and helped bring politics down to its current level of contempt and cynicism, but at least he was good at it. You would never have seen Blair sitting next to a gun in a helicopter, just to begin with. Brown's real failure is not to have led his party to its lowest ratings in a generation; it's that he's failed to be honest with himself, and in doing so, he's left the door wide open for David Cameron, just as agile as Blair, to skulk in.
Labels: death of Labour, fall of Gordon Brown, Gordon Brown, Gordon Brown one year on, integrity, politcs, spin
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