Gordon brown

Mental illness has always taken up a lot of space in the lexicon of New Labour,  I have always thought Alistair Campbell’s own brush with the black dog had something to do with this. From Ron Davies’s “moment of madness” to Gordon Brown’s “psychological flaws”, the terror of incipient madeness has always been a New Labour nightmare. I wrote about this tendency a few years ago but recent events have brought me back the subject. It was telling that Damian McBride’s emails contained references to Frances Osborne’s state of mind – as if it would be a bad thing that she was upset by her husband’s political misfortunes. It seemed inconceivable in the

Hazel Blears knows exactly what she’s doing by intervening in print during the Labour Party’s darkest spring. Think of it the other way around. Ministers know that when the Prime Minister pledges 100 per cent support then it’s curtains. It’s a sign of the declining authority of Number 10 that this rule has now been inverted. Cabinet loyalty is assumed. It should not have to be asserted. Hazel Blears is stating the obvious, which is very dangerous indeed. Of course the government was on the wrong side of the gurkha debate, of course it is failing to communicate with the voters, of course the YouTube performance was a disaster. But Cabinet ministers

This month’s Standpoint carries a powerful piece by Nick Cohen about the recent bad behaviour in the court of the Prime Minister. I will say no more than that.

Just to clarify. I didn’t intend to suggest in my last post that Damian McBride’s smear tactics would have been excusable if they had worked. Sorry if I gave that impression. I was simply trying to explain the thinking behind the operation. The smears were unacceptable in any circumsatnces The Prime Minister’s belated apology suggests that he now knows how toxic this has become. He is right to be angry because McBride has put his government at the mercy of a maverick right-wing libertarian blogger. Quite why he and the people around him became quite so fixated on Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes), is completely beyond me.  But they were

The revelations over the weekend about Damian McBride’s pitiful smear campaign have probably delivered the fatal blow to Labour’s chances of winning the next election. The only possible excuse for writing such filth would be that it served the interests of the battle against the Tories. It has had the opposite effect. Most decent people would think twice about voting for a government that permitted such a culture to exist in Downing Street. The poison expressed in McBride’s infantile stratagem has fed back into the bloodstream of the party  he was supposed to be serving (let’s not pretend for a moment that he was acting as a civil servant in this. But the

It’s Easter Sunday and I have better things to do than think about sleazy emails. I’m unlikely to be able to post again about this again today, but I have much to say on the subject and Iain Dale in the Mail on Sunday has already quoted my previous comments about the thuggish company the Prime Minister sometimes chooses to keep. This is very serious for the Prime Minister, especially now Charlie Whelan’s name has been associated with the emails. The Tories have asked Gordon Brown to apologise and he probably should. I have always marvelled at the latitude Brown gave to his lieutenants. This has allowed him to distance himself, if

The tawdry tale of Damian McBride’s “juvenile and inappropriate” emails about Conservative politicians is pretty grim as it is. But it is just possible to imagine how the situation might be worse. What if someone even closer to McBride were on the circulation list, for example? Someone like Charlie Whelan, for example. That would be truly dreadful. And what if the emails were circulated even further, dragging in others, like Whelan, with close links  to the unions who will fund Labour’s next election campaign. Now that is so awful it is almost beyond imagination. Gordon Brown’s loyalty has always been his best and worst quality. There are many within the

At the height of the internal Labour Party coup against Gordon Brown just before the last Labour Party conference even the Prime Minister’s greatest detratctors agreed that he did the international economic stuff rather well. I remember one senior Blairite heavyweight suggesting that after his removal, Brown should be allowed to occupy a new role as a roving economic ambassador. Since then, his reputation for economic competence has undergone an assault from which few would recover. But, whatever his opponents might say (and Fraser is right to say that it was largely done with smoke and mirrors), the G20 summit ended up as something of a triumph or Gordon Brown. I

It wasn’t so long ago that senior Labour politicians were suggesting that Gordon Brown should use the coup of the G20/Obama visit to bounce straight into an election. It seems bizarre now, but such was the confidence of the Labour Party in those early days of the economic crisis that there were close allies of the Prime Minister urging him to go to the polls this spring. Their only concern was that it might be too late. The ideal time for those urging a snap election (the second in a series of elections that never were) was February. Now, the idea that Brown will do anything but wait until the last minute seems inconceivable, but anything’s possible.

The brutal truth about politics is that a whole career can often be telescoped into a single defining event. The judgement of history can be particularly cruel on  unlucky Prime Ministers. Ted Heath’s reputation is dominated by the 1972 miners’ strike, Jim Callaghan is synonymous with the “winter of discontent” and Anthony Eden, perhaps the most ill-starred of all post-war PMs, will be forever associated with a single word: “Suez”. All those years of vaulting ambition, grinding thankless work and genuine public service reduced, in the end, to those two damning syllables. And how thin sometimes is that line between success and failure. Who remembers John Major for his remarkable

A good mini-scoop from the Independent on Sunday based on an article from Peter Hain. News stories based on articles by politicians are often the last refuge of a political journalist who has run out of road. But this piece by Jane Merrick and Brian Brady is an exception. The former Work and Pension Secretary is putting his head above the parapet on this one and issuing a rousing call for the Labour Party to return to its true values. He makes similar points in his interview in the Sunday Telegraph, although that newspaper chose to make a little less of them.   The following two paragraphs in the Hain piece in the Sindy are a genuine challenge to the

There’s some really fascinating stuff knocking around today. Rachel Sylvester’s column in The Times is really quite extraordinary. She claims that in a conference call with Peter Mandelson and Ed Balls, the Prime Minister could not be persuaded to concentrate on domestic policy and kept returning to the international global crisis. Were there others involved in the call or is one of Balls or Mandelson briefing the Blairite Sylvester (hmm, I wonder)? Pete Hoskin over at Coffee House has suggested that the level of humility in Alistair Darling’s interview in today’s Telegraph and similar noises from Ed Balls suggest that perhaps Brown will go for a mea culpa of his

No one outside Downing Street can imagine how tense it must be getting in the bunker as the economic situation worsens and the period Gordon Brown has to turn things around shortens. My suspicion is that it is getting very tense indeed. I was informed on Friday that  No 10 was not happy with some of the things I have been writing on The Bright Stuff. We already know that people around the Prime Minster were concerned at the suggestion that they were studying footage of Obama’s apologies. Officials have been unable to identify the person who was asking for this footage I am told. All very mysterious. But then again, would you put your hand