Alastair Campbell told the crowd: ‘Unite behind Gordon to win’. But can they?

12 May 2007

Fraser Nelson says that the departure of Tony Blair and the arrival of Gordon Brown will mark a clear-out of personnel and a marked change in style. The risk is that the new Prime Minister becomes a force for division and the object of derision

The larger challenge for Mr Brown will be one of personal presentation. He has stopped pretending to like pop music, but stories of his other-worldliness still fill newspaper columns. When he was recently sent to meet Jermaine Jackson, brother of Michael Jackson, he instead turned to the singer’s wife and said how much he enjoys her (non-existent) work. Worse, he was recently photographed at an official visit with his trouser leg tucked inside his sock. His trademark syncopated smile and other tics — permissible in a Chancellor, the nation’s trusted book-keeper — will seem much odder in a Prime Minister attempting to speak to and embody modern Britain.

None of these is a hanging offence. But when Alastair Campbell concocted the story about John Major tucking his shirt into his underpants, he knew the political damage that can be inflicted by making a politician a laughing stock. It is no accident that Mr Blair called William Hague’s Tory party ‘weird, weird, weird’. Once, Blairite MPs would laugh just as hard about the Chancellor’s gaucheness. Now, their own political survival — in government and, in about six dozen cases, as MPs — depends on Mr Brown raising his game. They fear that he may become an object of national derision. But there is nothing much they can do about that now.

On the Friday after the elections, Labour held a party in Soho House in London for serving and former aides. It was effectively a wake for the Blair years — and spirits dampened by the loss of Scotland and 500 English seats in the elections were restored by the free bar. Blairites drank and reminisced with former Brown aides: there was a palpable sense of amnesty. The man once seen as the Chancellor’s nemesis, Alastair Campbell, made a speech. ‘Now, we will all get behind Gordon Brown and help him win the next election,’ he said. There was quiet, then a cheer. Although many in Labour may hate to admit it, they are all Brownites now.