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Wednesday 9 July 2008

Leading article

Brown’s fatal flaws

The Spectator on Gordon Brown's premiership

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The latest funding scandal is only the most recent misfortune to attend the Brown premiership, after the debacle of the missing discs, the continuing reverberation of the Northern Rock collapse and the revelation that illegal immigrants were employed by the state in sensitive security positions. For those inclined to be moved by pity, the spectacle of a government buffeted by these crises might inspire sympathy, and an acknowledgement that any administration can be unlucky, and no definitive judgment should be passed on ministers just because events conspire against them. But, as the Independent columnist Steve Richards, himself a Labour sympathiser, has pointed out, accident-prone politicians aren’t accident-prone by accident. Labour’s current misfortunes and Brown’s present woes flow from deep flaws in his approach to the task of leadership. Just as Shakespeare’s heroes fell because of flaws inherent in their character, so Gordon Brown is paying for mistakes he has made, errors which reflect deep weaknesses in his own leadership style.

The Prime Minister has always liked to operate through a tight cabal, restricting information and power to a limited circle of trusted figures chosen more for their loyalty than ability. As our political editor revealed last year, Mr Brown would only allow a very small number of political allies and officials to speak, or act, on his behalf. When he moved to No. 10, Mr Brown appeared, briefly, to appreciate that this Nixonian approach of trusting only a tight circle of blood brothers wouldn’t work and he tried to create a more broadly based administration, the so-called Government of All the Talents. But the Government of All the Talents has become an administration which treats ministers like servants, with No. 10 slapping down any department that steps out of line, or dares to innovate, and unattributable briefing used to undermine those who have fallen from favour by presuming to think for themselves.

This style of bunker government has its roots in the way Mr Brown organised his office in opposition and operated while at the Treasury. He ran an operation which secured its objectives by brutalising colleagues who stood in his way and which weakened the Labour party itself by continually ramping up internal opposition to Tony Blair. Mr Brown may feel he owes a debt to the political knife-fighters who helped him drive Mr Blair from office, but they are not proving half as effective in running the show as those whom they supplanted.

Senior civil servants openly share their concerns about how Downing Street now operates. Decisions which need to be taken promptly if the machinery of government is to function smoothly are delayed endlessly while the Prime Minister broods and tries to calculate where political advantage lies. This fatal subordination of good governance to political calculation was never more apparent than in the open manoeuvring around the party conference season over the question of an early election.

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