The Alexander technique

James Forsyth

25 June 2011

/article_images/articledir_14090/7045198/1_listing.jpg

Brown’s former disciple is now trying, very gingerly, to reconcile Labour with Blairism

Douglas Alexander is a politician who has risen without a trace. He is now shadow foreign secretary, the third most senior member of the shadow cabinet. He has spent his career in the service of bigger beasts, first Gordon Brown and then David Miliband, so few know who he is or what he stands for. Now, at age 43, he is determined to make himself heard. As he tells me when we meet in his Commons office, ‘One of the vanishingly few consolations of opposition is having a more public voice for what I believe and where I think we need to go as a party and as a country.’

Alexander’s office resembles a psychoanalyst’s consulting room. It is dark, with a shelfload of earnest-looking books above his desk and there are two comfy black chairs that you sink into.

The impression of being in an analyst’s room is heightened once the interview gets under way. Alexander, it is clear, wants to commit political patricide and bury the Brownite approach to politics.

For years, Alexander was Brown’s mini-me. A son of the manse and a star of Edinburgh university, he went to work for Brown straight after finishing his degree. They used to swap books. Brown entrusted Alexander with running his general election campaign. But their relationship never recovered from ‘the election that never was’ in 2007, when Brown, disastrously, marched his troops up the hill and marched them down again. Some of the Brown circle blamed Alexander.

When I ask if that changed him, I’m met by a terse and defensive ‘not much’. His body language, though, rather gives him away: his arms are crossed across his chest, protectively holding his sides. When I press him on this question, he replies in a deadpan tone that ‘the headlines that went with “the election that never was” didn’t really affect me. If you’ve grown up in the Scottish Labour party you are rather used to some of the briefings and general unpleasantness.’

1 | 2 | 3 Next page