Leading articles

From clunk to cluck

13 October 2007

The Spectator on the week's events

Mr Brown’s greatest coup in his first few weeks was to appear new and fresh: in pollsters’ jargon, ‘to be the change’. Yet in the past fortnight his behaviour has been wearyingly familiar, bearing all the trademarks of old New Labour: spin, stunts, evasiveness and outright deceit. In his press conference on Monday, inevitably dominated by his election decision, Mr Brown was asked: ‘Can you say, with your hand on your heart, that the polls had nothing to do with your decision?’ He answered: ‘Yes, I can.’ Yet there, in clear view of the cameras, were the words ‘saw polls’ on his notes. Mr Cameron was quite right to say at PMQs that Mr Brown is ‘treating the British people as fools’.

The PM claims that he decided not to hold an election because he wants to explain his ‘vision’ first. That, of course, is a reason for him to go to the country now. The mandate he inherited from Tony Blair is based on the 2005 Labour manifesto. If he has a new and quite different plan for the nation then he is morally obliged to present it to the people, and to let them have their say.

It is odd, moreover, that a PM so allegedly keen to explain his ‘vision’ to the electorate allowed his conference speech in Bournemouth — surely the ideal moment to unveil his grand philosophy — to be overshadowed by feverish election speculation. And this in turn reflects a deeper problem: that the PM, for all his undoubted academic gifts, is losing the intellectual initiative.

Alistair Darling’s combined Pre-Budget Report and Comprehensive Spending Review on Tuesday was a humble bonsai tree of an announcement when Labour needed a mighty oak to be planted in the political soil. Its littleness lay in the fact that so much of it was derivative: openly lifted from the Tory party’s proposals at its Blackpool conference last week. George Osborne feigned the outrage of a householder who has caught a burglar red-handed. In truth, he could barely conceal his delight that a Labour Chancellor should so brazenly copy — or half-copy — Conservative ideas on inheritance tax, aviation duty and the taxation of non-domiciled residents.

New Labour, of course, has always been good at stealing Tory ideas and repackaging them in pastel colours. John Major used to complain that he felt like a man who had gone for a swim and found that his clothes were missing when he got back to shore. Indeed, part of Mr Blair’s political genius was to grasp that it was the Tory party rather than Tory ideas that the public was sick of.

But what Messrs Brown and Darling did this week was not an act of confident opportunism. It reflected a new mood of panic and defensiveness, of intellectual exhaustion. As Disraeli said of the Liberal government in 1872, this Cabinet already resembles ‘a range of exhausted volcanoes’ — not because it lacks vigorous personalities, but because it is running desperately short on ideas. Worse, Labour is starting to run against the grain of popular opinion.