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.
One former No. 10 staffer says Mr Blair ‘is telling them, as clearly as he can, not to brief against Gordon — and that the only people who benefit are the Tories’. But how can he control them? Ms Jowell can only do so much. And while Mr Blair has his foreign trips and international celebrity to sustain him, what’s there for those left behind? Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, cannot practice law any more, and recently wrote an article warning Mr Brown not to give the impression of ‘drift, not leadership’. Alan Milburn maintains the silence of an unexploded bomb. John Reid is talking about setting up his own thinktank.
Many other Blairites are too scarred by battle to be reconciled to the Brown era, or to stay very quiet for very long. Peter Mandelson in Brussels has not exhausted his capacity for barbed criticism. We have yet to hear a squeak from Stephen Byers — on the record, at least. Calming them down will be hard — not least because they believe that, after the usual honeymoon, their predictions about Mr Brown have proved completely accurate. Worse, they know that Mr Blair, for all his demands for stage-managed loyalty, privately agrees with them. The first cheque for an advance on prime ministerial memoirs can do wonders to calm the nerves. The same sedative is not available to the orphaned Blair gang.
One man Mr Blair does not have any control over is Dr Seldon. The second instalment of his book is due to run in the Mail on Sunday this weekend, and it is laden with destructive potential. The book is widely acknowledged to be brilliantly sourced, and loaded with the type of disclosures many thought would not reach the public domain until Mr Blair’s autobiography was published — and perhaps not even then. A biography from the Master of Wellington College cannot be dismissed as political sour grapes, or exaggerated journalese. And Dr Seldon has plenty to say not just about Mr Brown, but about those around him.
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