Gordon’s one-man show

This will not be a Labour conference. It is Gordon’s one-man show

Fraser Nelson

19 September 2007

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Brown will be father of the nation at Bournemouth

So far, he has found them in plentiful supply. ‘I talk to a lot of Conservatives,’ he boasted to the Daily Telegraph earlier this month, ‘and they want a politics that is not as partisan as the past.’ This is a polite way of saying that many Tory donors and MPs are despairing of ever seeing power, and reckon that ‘advising’ Mr Brown may be the closest they will get to it. After the outright defection of Quentin Davies, Patrick Mercer and John Bercow are to advise him on security and special needs education respectively.

As Mr Brown puts it, ‘People are fed up with confrontational politics ... by my very nature I want to be someone who speaks for the whole of the country.’ Many in Westminster may give a hoarse laugh to all that: this is, after all, a man expected to call the greatest confrontation of all, a general election, in the next few months, and sure to fight it with awesome ferocity.

Mr Brown’s Tory recruits stress that they have brought a long spoon with which to sup with him. (Wonderfully, Lady Thatcher’s next appointment was to visit a gorilla in London Zoo, as if to make a point.) Yet all of them are politically savvy enough to guess Mr Brown’s true objectives. What agonises the Tory high command is that they have no idea how many more may be willing to help the PM — purely in the national interest, old boy, of course — and whether any further ‘advisers’ will be announced just before or during Labour’s party conference to sow discord and confusion in Tory ranks.

The case of Johan Eliasch, the Tory donor now ‘advising’ Mr Brown, has in particular led Conservatives to fear that he is just the first in a long line. He was, I understand, on a short list of ten considered for a peerage on Michael Howard’s resignation list, but rejected after a fierce row. Labour had spotted his discontent, and the Tory central command did not. ‘No wonder the country is in such a state, if Cabinet members are spending all their time chatting up our donors,’ says one exasperated official. ‘We now know for a fact that they are talking to more of them.’ There are fears that the 84-year-old Sir Tom Cowie may be next.