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Welcome to Brownland, where everything that goes wrong is blamed on one man

Anne McElvoy

Wednesday, 4th June 2008

Anne McElvoy reviews the week in politics

It’s a funny old thing, the Labour party. For ten years it tolerated Tony Blair, hoping that if it put up with him long enough, it would get the leader it really wanted. Naturally, it also assumed that this would entail having the best bits of Mr Blair (winning) without the war-mongering, populist, slippery, free-market parts. Go Gordon!

Well we know what happened next. Mr Brown enjoyed the shortest honeymoon since Ian McEwan’s uptight couple failed to get it together at Chesil Beach. A slew of bad luck and bad management combined to change his image from proud Atlas, on whose shoulders the British economy could rest secure, to Mr Bean, wrecking everything he touches.

One eminent New Labourite describes a conversation this week in a shoe-repair bar in which the man at the lathe reeled off sundry complaints about the state of the nation above the din and concluded, ‘What do you expect? It’s Brownland innit?’

Brownland has reached that state of generalised disaffection where everything that goes wrong, from the impact of oil price rises to floundering banks and street stabbings falls indiscriminately on the man in Number 10.

Take the fuss over the PM’s ‘cold calls’ to members of the public, widely mocked as a counsel of pleading despair. I had one of those ghostly memories that Mr Blair was not above a bit of chat with Acacia Avenue when he was in the top job and cold-called two of his former aides to check. One said that his old boss had refrained from doing so because it was gimmicky. There’s hindsight for you. The other replied that he had indeed made occasional discreet personal calls in reply to letters which he had read and which touched him.

Both agreed that the real error was in the timing and place of it becoming public: in PRWeek, of all places. No evidence exists whatsoever for the PM making any unsolicited calls at 6 a.m., a detail guaranteed to provoke derision. A senior Number 10 insider who knows his diary says, ‘For one thing, I am sure the system wouldn’t allow it and it would be discourteous. He simply wouldn’t do that.’

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CS

June 5th, 2008 12:55pm

***In the days when all the fashionable talk was of an early election, Peter Mandelson flattened the idea, telling someone who suggested it, ‘I’ve known Gordon for more than 20 years and I can tell you that the date of the election will be May 2010.’***

Hang on. Didn't we discover that Gordon had splashed out nearly a million pounds of Labour's money preparing for an early election?

Or did he do this to mislead all of us? After all, Labour can easily afford to lose a million here and there, can't it?

Complete nonsense, therefore, surely, to suggest that he planned to wait until 2010 all along.

Ian

June 6th, 2008 11:21am

@ CS
Surely Mandelson's point was that GB would lose his nerve, not that he never entertained the idea of an early election?

jon livesey

June 6th, 2008 11:50pm

In the middle of 2008, 2010 isn't all that far away. My own guess is that Labour insiders have reconciled themselves to losing the next one, with or without Brown.

If that's correct, letting Brown lose it and conducting a leadership contest in opposition will attract a bit less ridicule than trying to switch horses in the next year and a bit.

My money is on Miliband. He's got just that necessary bit of thuggishness to be an effective leader. I can't imagine a PMQ being quite such a walkover for Cameron v. Miliband as it currently is.

Brown's problem is that you either buy what he says, or he sits and sulks on the front bench. In office or in opposition, Miliband would be out there with a stiletto; blood all over the place.