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Thursday 4 December 2008

Leader of the lemmings

The Spectator on the Labour leadership speculation

So madly introspective and self-obsessed has Labour become that it seems almost impolite to intrude upon its private agonies. Yet since the party is still notionally governing the nation it is our duty to knock on the door, and ask what all the tears and shouting are about.

The conduct of the government since the Glasgow East by-election has been a study in the pathology of denial. The Prime Minister and his colleagues insist that they are ‘getting on with the job’ and focusing on the public’s priorities — refusing, so they claim, to be distracted by little local difficulties. One wonders how many little local difficulties are needed — the town hall elections, Boris Johnson’s victory, Crewe and Nantwich, the fall of Glasgow East, disastrous polls — before they face the music.

Naturally, the Labour movement’s every thought is now turned to the question of leadership. It is often said that, in contrast to the Tories, Labour has no tradition of regicide, but this is no longer true. Mr Brown himself saw to that. Between the so-called ‘Granita’ deal of 1994 and Mr Blair’s forced resignation announcement in September 2006, Mr Brown and his cohort undermined the incumbent at every turn until exit was his only option. This 12-year apprenticeship changed the Labour movement fundamentally: it has tasted blood and learned that it can indeed drive out a leader whom it has come to regard as a liability. Mr Brown is now the victim of the very black arts in which he schooled his party.

The consequence is that Labour’s behaviour now closely resembles that of the Tories before and immediately after the 1997 election. This week, all the talk has been of a potential ‘dream ticket’ bringing together David Miliband and Alan Johnson — a remarkably close echo of those in the mid-Nineties who called for a Portillo–Heseltine duumvirate. Curious alliances are proposed. Just as the Europhile Kenneth Clarke and Eurosceptic John Redwood formed an axis in 1997 in a (doomed) attempt to deny William Hague the Tory leadership, so in 2008 there is bizarre talk of an insurgent alliance of neo-Blairites and the left-wing Compass group. And, as in the Major years and their grisly aftermath, absolutely anyone can be a leadership hopeful: for Redwood in 1995 and 1997, read Harriet Harman in 2008.

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