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Thursday 4 December 2008

The ghosts of the past

The ghosts return as Brown fights to escape the Blairite past

At the Labour party conference in Bournemouth, Tony Blair was airbrushed out of the picture. But this week Blair’s ghost has returned to haunt Gordon Brown with a new biography of the ex-PM, sniping from the disaffected and the evidence of Yates of the Yard on cash for honours. The challenge now for Gordon Brown is to lay out an agenda that allows new Labour to move beyond its past.

Yet this week, and no less dramatically, the ghost of Tony Blair has returned to the feast like Banquo’s. His biographer, Anthony Seldon, has revealed new and extraordinary details of Blair’s final months in which the then Prime Minister declared himself an ‘abused and bullied wife’. The word at Westminster is that Cherie Blair is not enjoying life after No. 10, and that her memoirs will even blame Mr Brown’s guerrilla campaign for her husband’s heart condition. Blairite ex-ministers are popping up in newspapers with disobliging, anonymous comments — or, in Lord Falconer’s case, on the record calls for Mr Brown to deliver a ‘vision’. And then on Tuesday we had assistant commissioner John Yates in the House of Commons, resurrecting the loans-for-honours horror with some very piquant remarks about how New Labour does business.

For Mr Brown, this is torment from beyond the grave. Isn’t Mr Blair meant to be vanquished, dealt with, safely in exile in some Middle Eastern sinecure? Is this another plot to destabilise him? Would that it were so simple. I gather Mr Blair has been genuinely aghast at suggestions he is behind all this. He has asked his gang to behave itself, and has sent his close ally Tessa Jowell out to keep the peace. But there are limits to what such personal entreaties can achieve. The horrid truth for Mr Blown is that all this is not about a revived personality cult, or even the vengefulness of a faction (as strong as that emotion may be). It is about the ideological fault line which still divides the Labour party.

For some time now, we have been waiting for Gordon Brown’s ‘vision’ — the image of the future so compelling that he claims he had to cancel an early election, the better to explain it to us. Labour MPs are growing impatient. ‘I suspect Gordon is bluffing,’ says one. ‘There is no alternative Labour vision of the future other than the Blair one. His vision seems to involve turning the clock back ten years, to top-down state control. And if he does that, the election is as good as lost.’

Here lies Mr Brown’s problem. He has adopted a disposal strategy for the Blairites (‘divide and rule,’ says one ex-Cabinet member, ‘some of us in government, others obscurity.’) There has even been a purge of Blairite buzzwords and phrases. ‘War on terror’ is out, for instance, and the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit has been ordered to drop the words ‘choice’ or ‘contestability’. But Mr Brown has not been able to vanquish Blairism itself, an election-winning approach to politics which is alive and kicking in the minds of many senior Labour figures.

More articles from: Fraser Nelson | this section

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