Do the big brothers really want to topple Brown? Or do they just hate each other?

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

Who’s the Manchurian candidate? That’s what I want to know. Even Tony Woodley, the hatchet-chinned joint general secretary of the Unite union, who has pursued a decade-long mission to cripple the competitiveness of the British airline industry, must realise that the timing of the BA cabin-crew strike is catastrophic for Labour’s election prospects. And if dear old Bob Crow, the railwaymen’s leader and the last Leninist in British public life, wades in to bring the trains to a halt for Easter — the week before the election is likely to be called — it will be game over for Gordon before he’s even had time to pin a Unite-funded rosette to his lapel.

That’s the bit I don’t understand: if Unite is Labour’s paymaster, how can its politburo possibly want the party in their pocket to lose? If that’s not what they want, then the cabin-crew dispute, which has little public support, looks very much like Woodley’s personal vendetta against BA chief executive Willie Walsh. In which case, why can’t his fellow general secretary Derek Simpson restrain him (along with his sidekick ‘Red Len’ McCluskey, who likes quoting Che Guevara, and their man at Heathrow, Brian Boyd, who’s the spitting image of Coronation Street’s Les Battersby) for the good of the cause? But if they do want Brown to fall — despite the fact that his attack-dog Charlie Whelan is their own ‘political director’ — who would they install as Labour leader in his place? Surely it can’t be their own deputy general secretary Jack Dromey, who has just been awarded a safe Labour seat in Birmingham, in tandem with his wife Harriet Harman: that would be too horrific to contemplate. I’m no Kremlinologist of the British left, but I suspect the truth is that all of the above-named big brothers hate each others’ guts, have no collective strategy, and are blundering angrily towards self-destruction like their predecessors of 30 years ago.