It’s being reported that Gordon Brown has decided not to fight the next general election. Odd timing, you might think, he’s had almost five years to make up his mind – so why bail now, just four months away from the dissolution of parliament? Such a delay puts his successor at a distinct disadvantage, with only a few weeks to become established in the constituency.
The Sunday Mirror dutifully reports that a friend of Brown saying he wants to “go out on a high” after saving the union. I’d point to another factor – the extraordinary resurgence of the SNP (described by James Forsyth in this weeks magazine). This means that Brown might actually have a fight on his hands if he were to stay. A Survation poll last week suggested the nationalists will take 52 of Scotland’s 59 seats (yes, you read that correctly: they’d be bigger the Lib Dems). He’d probably be one of the seven survivors, but it’s not the prospect of defeat that’s the issue here – it’s the prospect of a real fight. This prospect has only emerged in the last few weeks, with the sudden collapse of the Scottish Labour vote. This forces many Scottish Labour MPs into a decision: stay and fight – or bottle it. Anyone familiar with Brown’s CV knows that, in such circumstances, he prefers the bottle.
He notoriously bottled out of holding a general election in 2007 when polls showed he might have trouble in a few southern marginals. When the Boundary Commission redrew his Dunfermline seat, it contained too many Liberal Democrats for his liking – it might mean he had to fight! So he kicked Lewis Moonie out of the safer, next-door seat of Kirkcaldy and moved in. Brown even bottled out of a fight for Labour Party leader, doing everything he could to deter challengers after Tony Blair’s departure. His modus operandi is brooding, plotting and deploying character assassins to do his dirty work for him. This got him to 10 Downing St – such tricks work in the dark. But never in the daylight of open, democratic elections.
The Labour meltdown that we see today, at its most spectacular in Scotland, has its roots in the way Brown conducted himself in office. He made sure that the Blair project did not regenerate by having his assassins destroy the political career of talented Blairite ministers who flourished in the era where New Labour actually won elections. Sure, Brown gave a good speech during the referendum campaign, but should ask: after 20 years of his being the godfather of Scottish Labour, why was this vote ever on a knife-edge? How did his party come to lose many of its supporters to the nationalists? And why, now, have they stayed loyal to the nationalists?
Brown has done his party what he did to the British economy. His speciality is destroying, rather than building. So now, suddenly faced with the consequences of his stewardship of Scottish Labour in the form of the SNP threatening him in his own backyard, Brown has decided to bottle it – and leave others to clean up the mess.
Update: The headline of this piece may be proved incorrect: it would not surprise me if Brown accepts a peerage and sneaks back to Westminster that way.
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