Politics

7 March 2009

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

If there is anything that can bring Gordon Brown a shred of comfort, it is that almost no one in the Labour party is now speculating about his future. There is no shortage of plotting in the bars, tearooms, corridors and urinals of the House of Commons. But what happens to the Prime Minister himself is a subject of negligible interest. He is universally expected to lose the next election and then be gone. Labour MPs are focused on a far more sombre matter: the coming battle not just for the party’s soul, but its very survival.

This is the key to understanding a run of political stories that might otherwise be baffling. Why is Lord Mandelson so brazenly insistent on privatising the Post Office but nationalising banks? Why is Harriet Harman talking about changing the law to claw back a banker’s pension that was approved by other ministers? Why, indeed, is Harriet Harman talking — and why do we listen? Why is Ed Balls making pronouncements on the economy at a Labour Yorkshire conference? It only makes sense when seen through the prism of the Labour leadership battle. Almost the entire Cabinet is on manoeuvres.

To play Labour’s game of mental chess, one must first imagine what the party’s post-electoral chess board might look like. Almost half of today’s players will probably have been swept away. The opinion polls suggest that Alistair Darling, Jacqui Smith, John Hutton, Jim Murphy and at least 125 other Labour MPs will be gone, and with them a large part of the moderate, Blairite wing of the party. The surviving Labour party will look and sound much closer to Kinnock’s tribe than to Blair’s movement. Trade unions will probably be keeping Labour alive financially, and will have an incredible opportunity to remould the party.

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CharlieRay15

March 5th, 2009 12:49pm Report this comment

Please let it be Harman!

WheresMyVote

March 5th, 2009 2:17pm Report this comment

"Labour’s game of mental chess" gives too much credence to the opinion that there is any thought at all in the Labour party.

The lobby fodder have realised that turning up and doing what they are told is not going to keep their snouts in the trough any longer. So suddenly everyone is scrambling to find a set of morals they can cling to.

Mark Adrian Solomon

March 5th, 2009 5:48pm Report this comment

This implosion is all just so amusing to watch. Schadenfreude! Or to put it another way, sweet, sweet revenge for the long goodbye of the Major years.

Who said there wasn't justice in this world?