Can anyone take Labour out of this mess? I have previously dismissed the younger leaders on the grounds that they’d wait for Labour to lose, then try and get back. But with Brown’s ability to hit rock bottom and start drilling, they may be ushered forward anyway. There is never a right time, the best leaders are often decanted too early. David Cameron has grown into his job. So, too, could someone for Labour. And in tomorrow’s Spectator, we choose one: James Purnell.
I can just feel the CoffeeHouser comments coming on now: he’s a spiv, more FHM than PM, A Stepford clone, a perfect example of Peter Oborne’s identikit political class. Iain Dale’s recent verdict (“The empty vessel that is James Purnell”) fairly represents the conservative consensus. As one Shadow Cabinet member put it to me: “Purnell’s cardboard cut out would be a better leader than Purnell.”
The irony is that the fashion-conscious man has an image problem. “He’s too relaxed” one of his Cabinet colleagues tells me for the profile I write tomorrow. One of his friends (who all call him Jamie) says this: “If he wanted to conceal how serious he is, he couldn’t do better than those awful sideburns.”
Against this stands the testimony of people who have dealt with him on politics or policy and been taken aback by his grasp of detail. He can enter any statistical battle, and win. He understands welfare reform far better than Hain (okay, doesn’t say much). But he has responded well to Grayling on welfare, wooing back David Freud and effectively denying Grayling the clear lead he deserves on welfare reform. If Brown was as effective against the Tories across the board, Labour wouldn’t now be on the lowest share of the vote since universal suffrage.
Whereas Ed Balls and David Miliband often come across like the former senior policy wonks they once were, Purnell comes across as a type of accidental politician – a guy who woke up and found himself the Cabinet. Some accomplishment for someone whose pedigree is 100% apparatchik (IPPR/BBC/Blair) He comes across as being not of a Westminster tribe, more in tune with the outside world. This is precisely what Labour needs.
What swung it for me was Matthew Parris’ brilliant piece in last week’s magazine, where he wrote a draft resignation speech for a Cabinet member who would challenge Brown. I could only imagine Purnell delivering that speech. Being underrated, he might then create the type of momentum that Cameron had. But this is from what I know and hear about him inside Westminster (and from people like the private welfare-to-work firms that deal with him). I would not have come to this conclusion if all I knew was what I read in the papers.
My guess is that it is too late for anyone to save Labour and the party’s choice is between various shades of defeat. Its best-case scenario is a hung parliament and keeping three quarters of its MPs. But Brown is leading them to an historic wipeout from which it could take a decade to recover. He is unable to hold together the rapidly-unravelling New Labour coalition of voters. He cannot understand Cameron, like Purnell can.
When Thatcher stood against Heath in 1975, The Economist summed up the consensus saying she was “precisely the sort of candidate . . . who ought to be able to stand, and lose, harmlessly”. Only one publication supported her before the first ballot: The Spectator. I am by no means saying Purnell is a Thatcher. Just that one cannot always identify good leaders before they are appointed. The right leadership choice is very seldom obvious in advance, as Labour is finding out to its cost.
If I were a Cameroon, I would regard any option other than Brown as leader as a bad option. But seeing a Labour party with its back against the wall take a gamble on Mr Purnell would – I submit – be the most disconcerting option.
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