Clemency suggests

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Leading article

The sense of an ending

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

A party that breaks laws should not make laws

In theory at least, all is not absolutely lost for the PM. The Tories still have fewer seats than Michael Foot after the 1983 election and much work to do to define themselves as a prospective government. Mr Brown has legendary powers of stamina and patience. There may yet be a temporary reprieve. But the direction of travel becomes clearer by the day.

The bungling of the planned autumn election removed Mr Brown’s sheen as the candidate of ‘change’. A succession of administrative horrors — Northern Rock, the loss of confidential data about 25 million people, the cluelessness over immigration statistics, Britain’s wretched performance in international education league tables — has robbed him of his cherished reputation for competence. Instead, he leads a party that stumbles daily from one funding scandal to another, changing its story by the hour as more detail seeps out about who knew what when, who failed to record what, who inexplicably neglected to obey the most basic laws governing party finance.

The overall impression is not of ‘renewal’ — that grating New Labour cliché — but of disaggregation, introversion and crippling collective exhaustion. A party that breaks laws should not make laws. A party that cannot keeps its own house in order is not fit to tell the rest of us how to conduct our lives. Labour has had a decade to reform education, health, immigration policy and the abject criminal justice system. It has failed in all these tasks, in spite of propitious economic circumstances, and now seems incapable even of honest party bookkeeping.

The literary critic Frank Kermode identified what he called the ‘sense of an ending’. In everything that the governing party does now, one sees ideological twilight, mutual recrimination and a collective preparation for eventual disaster. Backbenchers run for cover. Ministers speak semi-openly about a change of leadership before the next election. Panic and paralysis are everywhere. The nerves of this government are shot to pieces. It flails and rages, to no great effect, provoking pity amongst its dwindling supporters and contempt in everyone else.

As we noted last week, the Prime Minister bears a heavy portion of the blame for what is happening. He and his supporters would say that Mr Blair is the real villain of the piece, that they are paying the price for ten years of Tony’s folly. But the truth is otherwise. The problem is not Brown or Blair. The problem is Labour.