Anne Mcelvoy

How do you solve a problem like Gordon? It’s all a question of character

How do you solve a problem like Gordon? It’s all a question of character

No, since you ask, he wasn’t drunk. I read with some interest that the former Home Secretary had been on the sauce when he told me that the Chancellor’s behaviour last week had been ‘absolutely stupid’ and attacked his suitability for the leadership.

Like Shakespeare’s Menenius, Mr Clarke is well-known as a politician who ‘loves a cup of hot wine/ with not a drop of allaying Tiber in’t’, but on late Thursday morning when we sat down to discuss the revolt against Mr Blair and its consequences, he didn’t touch a drop. What he was doing was something altogether more calculated and dangerous than lashing out after a drink. He was consciously putting on to the agenda one of the most dangerous challenges for a politician — a question mark over his character.

This is not like the routine business of having views and competences put under the microscope. If you are accused of being insufficiently ‘New’ Labour, you can emphasise your devotion to the modernisation of the party, as the Chancellor did with Andrew Marr on BBC television on Sunday. If you are dubbed insufficiently reformist by the Old Believer Byers–Milburn sect, you can wax lyrical about a ‘New Individualism’ and promise to embrace a wide coalition of influences.

But if the charge raised is simply, ‘There is something badly wrong with you, mate,’ then the response is more difficult. That is why those who most intensely dislike and distrust the Chancellor focus so intently on the question of what he is ‘really’ like rather than sundry other disagreements.

And with some justification. What Mr Clarke said could not really be dismissed as only the sour outpourings of a sacked Cabinet minister. There have long been uncertainties at the top of the Labour party about what the Chancellor would be like to work with, and how his personality would play in an electoral era when the ability to articulate national emotion and aspiration comfortably is part of the package.

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