The 12 days since David Miliband’s Guardian op-ed has seen Miliband both achieve a tactical success and a tactical failure. Indeed, the real gainers from this initial phase have been the other possible challengers.
Miliband’s achievement is that he is the boy who lived. He is the first Labour MP since Blair in 1994 to emerge as a serious threat to Brown’s leadership ambitions and survive. The fact that Miliband was not dispatched instantly means that his credibility has risen. His continuing presence in the government even after his performance on the Jeremy Vine show is a daily reminder of Brown’s weakness.
But if Brown is forced out, Miliband will be the candidate tarred with disloyalty and the one that the Brownites will do anything to stop. The Miliband camp has long wanted to avoid falling into this trap knowing that given his weakness in the Union section of Labour’s electoral college he is going to have to gain a sufficient cushion in both the party member and MP and MEPs bits of it to stand a chance, something he is extremely unlikely to do in these circumstances.
Perhaps the most under-appreciated development of the past few days has been how some of the other possible leadership challengers have been positioning themselves. Harriet Harman’s News of the World article last weekend included the rather curious phrasing, “there isn’t a leadership election-nor should there be.” The consensus among folk I have spoken to is that she is setting herself up as a loyalist/unity alternative to Miliband should Brown be forced out of Number 10. (For why I think Harman would be a formidable candidate in such circumstances click here)
By far the most significant development, though, was the Mail On Sunday’s story about relations between Brown and Alan Johnson being “close to breaking point”. Far more interesting than the talk about a Johnson-Miliband dream ticket, was that the paper had been told that Brown and Johnson had fallen out over Downing Street holding back the Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill in an attempt to avoid upsetting Catholic voters in Glasgow East. This bill has totemic importance to many Labour MPs and activists and having a “blazing row” with the Prime Minister over him holding it back will do Johnson a lot of good among the Labour selectorate. Indeed, it is a twofer for the Health Secretary as Harriet Harman is the Leader of the House. Shouldn’t she have persuaded the PM to press on with it? So, Johnson both appeals to the Labour selectorate and cuts into Harman’s base on one of its key issues.
One veteran of last year’s Labour deputy leadership race said to me just before I went away that one of the reasons he thought Johnson had come up short in that contest was that he did not have a proper spin doctor. Johnson has now remedied that with the appointment of Jo Revill, who was the Observer’s health correspondent and before that a member of the lobby. Staffing up, not returning calls from newspapers asking if Gordon can win and letting it be known that he’s to the ‘left’ of the PM on a key issue–taken together all this suggests that Johnson is on manoeuvres.
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