The ghosts of the past

The ghosts return as Brown fights to escape the Blairite past

24 October 2007

At the Labour party conference in Bournemouth, Tony Blair was airbrushed out of the picture. But this week Blair’s ghost has returned to haunt Gordon Brown with a new biography of the ex-PM, sniping from the disaffected and the evidence of Yates of the Yard on cash for honours. The challenge now for Gordon Brown is to lay out an agenda that allows new Labour to move beyond its past.

Ed Balls, Mr Brown’s most trusted lieutenant and now schools secretary, is quoted as saying Mr Blair was a ‘moron’ and that Mr Brown himself ‘bottled it’ by refusing to mount a putsch after last year’s May elections. Ed Miliband, then a backbench MP, is quoted as demanding to know, quite brazenly, what the Prime Minister would achieve from staying longer. A portrait emerges of a lethal team of backroom assassins — who are now, rather awkwardly, members of the Cabinet. It is precisely the opposite of the consensual, big-tent-pitching image Mr Brown has been at pains to nurture.

All this has been exacerbated by Mr Brown’s inaction. After cancelling the election and burgling Tory ideas in his pre-Budget report, he has seemed to lose the awesome momentum with which he entered No. 10. Normally a Prime Minister could be expected to regain the initiative in the Queen’s Speech, but Mr Brown published his new legislative agenda in June saying it would give parliament more time to scrutinise his plans. So if he slips in any new initiatives when Her Majesty opens parliament next month, it will look like panic — and springing a surprise on parliament after promising not to. The No. 10 policy laboratory spent so much time on Mr Brown’s speech, and then ideas for the (unneeded) Labour manifesto, that it has had little time to plan the year ahead. The project at present is to try to put flesh on Mr Brown’s buzzword of ‘personalisation’. Those caring for the infirm, runs one idea, will be given control over their budget. If £20,000 of NHS money is being devoted to looking after your elderly mother, you would be shown the breakdown and have the chance to spend it differently. It is a Brownite third way: greater power, but without a market mechanism.

While interesting in as far as it goes, all this falls rather short of the promised ‘vision’ for which the political world is waiting. ‘If you speak about vision,’ says one Labour source, ‘you need to have one.’ To many ex-Blairites, the focus on obesity and talk of new A-levels in 2013 is not a rival vision, but evidence of its absence. They are not pining for a Blairite Restoration, but fear the old order has been destroyed with nothing to replace it — leaving a vacuum into which the party may topple.

Mr Brown is still in telephone contact with Mr Blair. ‘They’re getting along, very much so,’ says one minister. ‘Even after all these years, there is still lots of fraternal affection.’ But Mr Blair is not the Prime Minister’s foe now. Nor, for the time being, is David Cameron his priority. His problem is the glum faces which fill the rows behind him at Prime Minister’s Question Time. His enemy now is not a person or a faction, but the inability of New Labour to escape its past.