Politics

13 September 2008

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

If Labour does dump Gordon Brown before the next election, then each of the three major parties will, this decade, have replaced a leader before he has had a chance to fight a general election. What used to be exceptional has become almost routine. This is a consequence of politics now running in double-time; the speeded-up news cycle means that what used to take years now happens in weeks.

Consider the almost total reversal of Gordon Brown and David Cameron’s political positions since the last conference season. Then Gordon swept all before him, while Cameron had to make a brilliant speech to save his career. Now, it is Brown who is under all the pressure.

Could the tables turn again; could Brown do a Cameron? That near-extinct species, a Labour optimist, might point out that what this magazine said about David Cameron just before the last Tory conference applies to Gordon Brown this year: ‘It may be cruel and unfair, but most people in Westminster believe the election to be lost already, and Mr Cameron to have already failed. He has until 3 p.m. on Wednesday to prove them all wrong.’

But somehow the idea of Gordon rescuing his career with a genius speech just doesn’t seem credible. This is not because set-piece speeches aren’t important any more. For all the talk of this being an age of ‘sofa politics’, on both sides of the Atlantic the last four years have been punctuated by political careers launched (Obama) or saved (Cameron), and in one case both (Palin), by a conference or convention speech. But Brown is an old dog who can’t learn new tricks — witness his rather tragic attempts to adopt the whole walking while talking thing recently. Another problem is that the Brown spin operation is dooming the Prime Minister’s speech in the way that it did the ‘relaunch’. By leaking highlights — in this case a mea culpa for the mistakes that have been made or a reference to the undoubted tragedies that Brown has had to face in his personal life — they drain these moments of much of their impact.

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