Martin Bright

Can the Government Dig Itself Out?

If you just read one newspaper today you’d know things were getting pretty bad for Gordon Brown. Let’s take the Observer for example: not exactly a hostile paper to the government over the years. Beyond the story of the defection of former DWP advisor David Freud to the Tory front bench, there’s a terribly damaging piece of analysis from Andrew Rawnsley. He observes that a serious split has opened up in Cabinet between the “no contrition” camp and those who believe the Prime Minister should find a way of showing some humility over his role in the economic crisis. As readers of this column know, Downing Street has been taking a close interest in President Obama’s recent public apology. But as a ministerial source told Rawnsley: “Gordon will never change. He does not do apologies.”

Rawnsley’s account of the exchanges at Cabinet is embarrassingly detailed:

“Harriet Harman led the charge by broadly repeating what she had said in a banker-bashing speech in Yorkshire a few days earlier. She argued that bonuses should be clawed back. When bankers compete with paedophiles for bottom place in the league table of public esteem, there’s no doubt that Ms Harman vents the fury of many voters.

But her intervention did not impress all of her colleagues. “Knee-jerk, crudely populist stuff,” sniffs one member of the cabinet. There was a sharp response from John Hutton and Hazel Blears who warned that it would be perilous in the longer term for Labour to be seen as hostile to business. Ms Harman retorted that it was hardly anti-business to be anti-banker because no one currently hates bankers more than businesses struggling to get credit.

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