Brown’s premiership will be short

14 April 2007

For the more balanced non-worshippers and the non-haters, this much is clear when it comes to the processes of government. Gordon Brown will be torn between his desire to restore faith in government and the integrity of its decision-making processes, and two of his most notable faults. As perhaps the first person to use the terms ‘Stalinist’ (the Guardian, 15 February 2006) and ‘Macavity’ (The Spectator, 9 September 2006) to describe the Chancellor, I must confess to pangs of envy when I saw how much attention Lord Turnbull got for his inadvertently copycat description of the Chancellor.

But those are apt descriptions. It is said that Stalin shot the first official who stopped applauding when he spoke; Brown has a tendency to send critics to political Siberia, never to be warmed by access to the Brown presence thereafter. He also disappears, Macavity-like, when a problem arises, as he did last month when it became clear that he had ignored officials’ warnings about some of the consequences of his treatment of pension funds. Ed Balls was assigned the role of spear-catcher.

Brown is as aware of these criticisms as he is of his habit of nail-biting, and about as capable of changing his behaviour as he is of abandoning that habit. But he is nevertheless likely to change at least some of the ways in which the government decides things: careful preparation and greater reliance on experts will replace Blair’s intuition; a greater formal emphasis on propriety will replace Blair’s confident reliance that people will understand that he is a regular kind of a guy and therefore incapable of impropriety.

So much for procedure. On to substance. Gordon Brown, given one wish, would opt for the end of world poverty, especially child poverty. But it is a safe bet that he will not recognise that the programmes he has crafted in the past ten years have failed — witness his persistence in relying on complicated tax credits in his final Budget. The notion that it is better to allow people to keep more of their own money than to snatch it from them as tax and then return it to them as a credit against that tax, is alien to a man who really believes that the national income is his, and it is for him to decide how much of his money to share with citizens.