Brown is not the problem — it’s his thuggish henchmen who need to be reined in

Wednesday, 24th February 2010

Martin Bright reviews the week in politics

Thinking about the events of the past week, I recalled an encounter with one of Gordon Brown’s closest allies at the Labour party conference in 2008, just after the summer of hate. I had written a blog which ended by saying that I had experienced at first-hand the ‘inept mafioso tactics of Brown’s political gangsters’. One morning I was approached by Ian Austin, the dapper MP for Dudley, who placed his face about an inch from mine and whispered, ‘What’s this about gangsters?’ I asked him to step off my toes and suggested that someone watching us might think he had made my point for me.

I explained that Charlie Whelan, who had re-emerged as the Prime Minister’s assassin-in-chief in his new role as political director at the Unite union, had threatened to have me fired from my job as the political editor of the New Statesman. My crime had been to make a television programme that was critical of Labour’s mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone. Whelan, a charmless mockney stage villain at the best of times, had publicly vowed that he would have words with the magazine’s owner, the millionaire MP Geoffrey Robinson, to have me removed from the job — though I have no evidence to suggest that Whelan followed through on the threat. None of this points directly at the door of the Prime Minister. Indeed, Geoffrey Robinson took the trouble to write a letter to the Times to deny Brown’s role in my removal. But it gives a sense of the culture that he allowed to develop around him.

Given the fact that the Prime Minister probably does throw more than newspapers across his office, it is remarkable that he manages to inspire such loyalty in those close to him. Some, like Ed Miliband and Tom Watson, are even quite nice people. His tragic — and potentially fatal — weakness is that he allows those he trusts to second-guess his will and to act on his behalf. Unfortunately, his ‘bad citizens’ do not always have the interests of the Prime Minister at heart. The reason many in Westminster (Labour MPs as well as hostile political journalists) are prepared to think the worst of Gordon Brown is that he permits this to happen.

The Prime Minister has issued a statement saying that he never instructed his aides to brief against Alistair Darling. This makes things even worse. If the ‘forces of hell’ were acting as rogue agents, why did the Prime Minister lack the authority to stop them?

Martin Bright is political editor of the Jewish Chronicle.

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A. MacAulay

February 25th, 2010 8:01am Report this comment

The devil will fulfill his part of the bargain but only in a way that exposes the vanity of the contractee. Brown's Faustian tragedy is his naive belief that one such as Blair would ever tell anybody, and least of all a rival, the truth.

The beleagured egocentric attracts poisonous, self serving courtiers. Minions will be trampled on to extract the last drop of the elixier of power. Truly amazing is the Tory capacity of making itself look fluffy in the face of this.

Boudicca

March 7th, 2010 9:10pm Report this comment

So we have a petulant, childish, liar in No. 10. One who cannot control his temper, likes to lob equipment and furnishings around the room and shove staff to one side if he is in a hurry and a bad mood. He is paranoid, has no social skills or empathy for people, he employs a raft of nasty attack dogs who do his dirty work for him ..... yet we are supposed to excuse him all this because he is so 'passionate' about the job.

Come off it. There has never been a man less suited to the office of Prime Minister. Every Labour MP should hang his/her head in shame that they allowed such a dreadful specimen to enter No.10 unopposed.