When historians looking back on Gordon Brown’s career are searching for an epitah, they may well settle on the former Chancellor’s claim to have “abolished boom and bust”.
Questionable at the time it was uttered, the crash of 2008 rendered it a nonsense, but there are lessons to be learned for the coalition as they try to unravel the mess left by the Labour Government. The comment mentioned above is an example of a Chancellor falling victim to hubris, and the Coalition must be careful to not to be afflicted by the same condition.
Conservative MP Rob Wilson’s book on the formation of a coalition government in May 2010, 5 Days to Power: The Journey to Coalition Britain, plays up the drama of the events, talking of how “Gordon Brown and David Cameron were both determined to do whatever was necessary to secure the position of Prime Minister” as if the story is one of a cliff-hanging drama which could have gone either way.
Whilst the outcome is certainly significant for British political history, what the book is far less convincing on is that there was really any serious chance of a Labour – …
Many insider accounts have already appeared of the events retold in David Laws’s book 22 Days in May: The Birth of the Lib Dem-Conservative Coalition. It is therefore one of the book’s strengths that not only is it written in a lively style which gives some freshness to the now familiar sequence of events but it also adds many new insights.
Although only briefly mentioned by Laws himself, perhaps the most important is how much the Liberal Democrats owe to Chris Huhne. In April, just before the second TV debate, I wrote,
There are two simple tests I have for books that recount events I was in some way involved in: do they accurately retell events that I have direct first-hand knowledge of and do they tell me something new about events I was one step removed from? If a book pasts both those tests, chances are the rest of the book is interesting and well-informed too – and The British General Election of 2010 by Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley passes both tests with near flying colours (the description of Guildford as a “top” Liberal Democrat target betraying an over-attention to swings to win list over actual party priorities whilst the quote from Disraeli about coalitions is actually rather misleading).
In large part that is because their account is based on hundreds of off the record interviews carried out during the last Parliament and in the immediate aftermath of the general election. Because the interviews have been carried out across political parties (and across factions within them), the authors present a much more robust picture of events than is the fate of some journalists who source their off the record information much more narrowly.
The more that comes out about how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown behaved (or perhaps more accurately, how Gordon Brown behaved towards Tony Blair) the more you wonder quite what world they were living in. Here, courtesy of The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt, is one of the latest revelations of the sort of behaviour that would get most people the sack but didn’t stop Gordon Brown getting the Premiership:
During tense negotiations over Britain’s EU budget rebate in 2005, the former prime minister became so exasperated with the Treasury that he kidnapped its man in Brussels.
What has already become the best-known anecdote in Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli is a snippet of conversation he had with his then master, Tony Blair. Powell asked him how he could put up with having a three-hour conversation with Gordon Brown, to which Blair responded by asking him whether he had ever been in love. ‘“Not with a man”, I replied’ — and we know he was lying. This book is testimony to his devotion to Blair.
It is, for sure, a curious billet doux -– less like a bunch of roses than a handful of thorns. Comparing, however …
I’m intrigued by Andrew Marr’s recent attack on blogging. For those who’ve missed his comments, here’s what he told an audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, as reported in the Telegraph:
“Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all. A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people. … Most of the blogging is too angry and too abusive. It is vituperative. Terrible things are said on line because they are anonymous. People say things
Welcome to a series where old posts are revived for a second outing for reasons such as their subject has become topical again, they have aged well but were first posted when the site’s readership was only a tenth or less of what it is currently or they got published and the site crashed, hiding the finest words of wisdom behind an incomprehensible error message. Today’s is a comment Gordon Brown made in 1997 that now, looking back after his Premiership, looks all too prescient about his own time at the top.
Speaking to Paddy Ashdown in 1997, Gordon Brown said:
The lovely phrase “spray on evidence” was coined in the late 1990s in frustration at the attitude towards evidence shown by many in the Labour government. Though officially the government was determinedly set on a course of evidence-based policy, many of those involved in policy making felt that evidence was being applied as a bit of glitter to justify policies rather than really shaping them.
Spray on history now seems to be the order of the day in much political punditry with the futures of the coalition, Liberal Democrats and Labour often talked about with several nods towards the past. A …
At the book’s title suggests, Peter Mandelson’s memoirs The Third Man do not hold back from placing himself not only at the heart of New Labour but also at its top, variously using the phrases the three musketeers or the triumvirate to describe himself and the two Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Mandelson is also, alongside Peter Watt and Deborah Mattinson, part of another trio – Labour insiders who have recently published their account of life in New Labour. They all scatter some compliments about Brown through their books, but the overall picture painted of Gordon Brown is a deeply unflattering one. It’s a picture of a once talented politician and strategic thinker who spent over a decade in a sulk at not becoming Labour leader, frequently indulging in highly partisan infighting and repeatedly pushing to one side policy priorities as so many at the top of Labour were consumed with trying to keep the Blair-Brown show from completely imploding. As Mandelson records it, even Gordon Brown (speaking to him in 2008) admitted,
Deborah Mattinson’s account of what she saw during her time as a leading pollster to the Labour Party certainly doesn’t stint in portraying her own role in what the book calls “Europe’s greatest election winning machine of the modern era”. The fact that Labour won three general elections in a row and yet the fact that, even looking no further than the same country and the same part of the century, the preceding Conservative government did one better and won four general elections in a row, does provide a warning against taking everything in the book – whether from the …
Nick Clegg has been giving a speech at the think-tank Demos today, setting out his vision for what this Parliament should achieve – and what the Liberal Democrats should get from it.
The heart of the argument is in this early section:
Now that the Liberal Democrats are in government, liberal ideas are being deployed directly. What you are seeing is liberalism in action. And I can tell you that as Deputy Prime Minister, my liberal instincts are stronger than ever. Our goal is clear.
By the time of the next election, on 7 May 2015, Britain will be a more liberal nation.
Throws a bit of a spanner in the works of the Labour rhetoric about how awful anyone who contemplates raising VAT is:
Amid reported wrangling between No 10 and the Treasury, Lord Mandelson suggested in his memoir that Mr Brown rejected a proposal from the chancellor to raise VAT while Mr Darling quashed calls for any future VAT rises to be ruled out. (BBC)
Mandelson writes that Brown and Darling rowed over economic strategy. He “vetoed point-blank” a proposal from Darling to raise VAT up to 18% or 19%. The then chancellor then blocked a proposal from Brown to rule out
The first of the post-New Labour memoirs, Lord (Peter) Mandelson’s The Third Man, begins its serialisation in The Times today.
Those who pay for the paper, in print or online, will have the joy of relishing its every detail. If like me you’re reliant on the Press Association’s fillet, it seems the big splash is what we knew already: that Nick Clegg told Gordon Brown he would have no option but to resign if there were to be any chance of Labour and the Liberal Democrats cutting a deal.
Unlike every other Labour MP except James Purnell, however, Nick did …
After adjusting for inflation, welfare spending today is an astonishing ten times higher than in 1948, according to figures published in yesterday’s Guardian.
The graph shows that the sharpest rises in welfare spending were both under Conservative administrations (presumably not unconnected with the recessions at those times – 1981-84 and 1991-94 – though the bill rose in all but three of the 18 years of Conservative government).
Only under Churchill and Eden in the 1950s did the welfare bill fall slightly. Under Macmillan it rose about 50%, and the welfare bill Labour inherited in 1997 was almost double that they’d handed …
After an extended election break, we’re reviving our Saturday slot posing a view for debate:
The election campaign of 2010 will, above all, be remembered for the transformative effect of the television debates, and the breakthrough of Nick Clegg. They were, in the main, substantive discussions in which real policies – and real political differences – were openly debated. But they also re-inforced the impression that British politics is, above all, about personality; and in particular, that the quality politicians need above all is empathy, an ability to connect with the voters they seek to represent.
Empathy is a vital quality of leadership. It is one which is perhaps tipping the balance of opinion in the Labour party against David Miliband, who comes across as less of a listener than his brother and rival, Ed.
But empathy can all too easily tip over into something else: an overly emotional reaction which blinds politicians to sound reason. The moment a politician loses his rag – however understandably, however provoked, however gloriously – is the moment I feel my respect draining away.
I do not want a politician who knows only how to emote. I want a politician with cool, clear, concise judgement. Our leaders are faced with umpteen improbably tricky decisions before breakfast: they cannot afford to waste their energies as the mood takes them.
Perhaps the ultimate exemplar of the non-emoting politician happens also to be the world’s most powerful leader, President Obama. Yet he has come in for criticism in recent days from the Washington media for failing to show sufficient anger at BP, forcing Obama to declare himself somewhat falsely ‘furious’ (while reasonably pointing out he wasn’t hired to yell at people):
I feel as though Norris McWhirter (late of the Guinness Book of Records) ought to have been kneeling at the foot of the Speaker’s Chair with his stopwatch for this momentous Prime Minister’s Questions. There were several records or firsts being set. The first coalition PMQs ever, I would suggest (I doubt whether Winnie or Ramsay or our David held such events). The first with Liberal Democrats on the government benches. The first with a party sporting its second female leader (Margaret Beckett was acting Labour leader after John Smith died). And it’s 13 long years since we had …
Having seen trailed in advance the research being done for today’s piece on why Labour/Lib Dem talks broke down, I was intrigued as to what James Macintyre would dig up.
But reading his piece, it’s a big disappointment – because it makes a trio of misjudgements, all of which burnish Labour’s reputation.
Let’s take them one by one.
First, he claims that the vetoing of a private meeting between Vince Cable and Alistair Darling someone shows the Lib Dems weren’t serious about talking to Labour. Actually, no. What it shows is that the party remembers how Gordon Brown went for a series …
Last week David Miliband announced his intention to stand for the Labour leadership, and there are already websites promoting and discussing potential contenders.
However, one of them is not what it seems:
It looks exactly like David Miliband’s personal website, http://www.davidmiliband.info, right down to the photo slideshow, and work has clearly gone into making it come out well in Google search results (known as Search Engine Optimisation).
Labour embarked on an odd campaigning trick yesterday. Two of Labour’s most senior (and tribally partisan) figures – Ed Balls and Peter Hain – called publicly on Labour voters to lend their support to the Lib Dems in those seats where the choice is Lib Dem or Tory. It’s inconceible that Ed Balls in particular would do so without the explicit consent of Gordon Brown.
In public Gordon Brown makes the case for a “maximum Labour vote” – how could he do otherwise as party leader? Yet the mixed signals will have given their cue to many Labour …
All the main parties have promised to cut the government’s deficit after the election. Which party do you think is being the most honest about what spending cuts they would make to deliver this?
Liberal Democrats 29%
Conservatives 26%
Labour 21%
Gordon Brown was challenged on Wednesday morning by Gillian Duffy, a 65-year-old voter in Rochdale. Mrs Duffy complained about taxation for pensioners, immigration from eastern Europe and students’ tuition fees. At the end of the televised encounter, Mr Brown told her ‘it was very nice to meet you’. But when he got into his car, Mr
Iain Dale quite rightly has queried why the prospect of Labour finishing third in the popular share of the vote isn’t a big story being talked about in the media.
But actually Iain is too kind to Labour.
Because the voting abyss Labour is teetering on the edge of is more than simply coming third. More than simply doing worse than Michael Foot. It’s on the verge of its worst share of the vote since 1918.
In 1983 Labour scored 28.3% and in 1918 it was 22.2%. (Both of these are figures for Great Britain, i.e. excluding Northern Ireland, as that’s the …
The Barking campaign is remarkable. Most notable have not been the antics, or should that be the absence, of Nick Griffin. Instead, it has been the response of the other main candidates – Margaret Hodge (Labour) and Simon Marcus (Conservative) – to the issue of immigration.
Hodge and Marcus have both rightfully slammed Griffin and the BNP, but then courted BNP voters and potential BNP voters with anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Asked about immigration by Eddie Nestor, host of a BBC Radio London one hour debate on Barking (April 16th), Hodge had not one positive word to say about immigrants. Instead, her analysis was …
Now the dust is starting to settle after the first debate, who are the winners and losers – aside from the party leaders?
Winner – liberalism
Loser – hostility to foreigners
Praising some aspects of immigration, talking about no like-for-like replacement of Trident, pledging to scrap tuition fees, promising to cut taxes for most by raising taxes for the very rich – Nick Clegg won the debate not by abandoning policies for some mushy middle ground, but by sticking to core liberal beliefs. Those beliefs were carefully wrapped in language and arguments designed to be appeal to a wide audience – but …
I cannot tell you how good it is to be able to type the words, “Nick Clegg was the clear winner”, and know that not only is it my view, but that it’s the public view, too. We’ve already published the two poll results which matter: those showed Nick was judged to have done best by 51%, with Cameron on 29% and Brown on 19% (YouGov), and Nick 46%, Cameron 26%, Brown 20% (ComRes).
Nick Clegg … it’s true, Nick had a couple of advantages going into the debate. He’s the least known, so merely being given equal status is already a win. True, too, expectations were lower for Nick. But even allowing for that, this was an important night for Nick. Those of us who have watched Nick at his town hall meetings will have been familiar enough with the style: natural, conversational, honest, open, personable. Though all were nervous, at least initially, Nick appeared to shrug off the jitters most quickly. His body language, crucial in a debate like this, was engaging, both with the audience in the studio, and the audience at home. What people saw tonight was the Real Nick Clegg. They seem to like him.
Gordon Brown … the Prime Minister started with low expectations, but for a different reason than Nick: most people have already made up their minds that he’s not up to the job. I was relatively (and I stress the word relatively) impressed with Brown’s performance.
I’ve used Edelman’s Tweetlevel tool for my monthly round-ups of how Liberal Democrat MPs are doing on Twitter, so the figures just outabout how the party leaders are doing as measured by that tool caught my eye.
Some of the headline findings are:
Gordon Brown wins Twitter war by volume
Clegg is the leader with most favourability
Cameron “gets people’s goats” – exciting most negative Tweets, but Cameron’s negative ratings have decreased since the call of the General Election
Tory NI pledge gives Cameron significant uplift in favourability
Over 50,000 Tweets on the party leaders since 22nd March, with nearly half of that since General
Voters should support the Liberal Democrats in constituencies where Labour cannot win, Gordon Brown has indicated, further fuelling speculation that Labour expects to be unable to form a majority government after polling day.
In an exclusive interview with politics.co.uk the prime minister gave his strongest signal yet that voters should consider tactical voting in order to prevent the Conservatives forming the next government…
“I want everybody to vote Labour and I want people to vote for our party, and I want our vote to be the highest and I want our number of seats to be
So, what did seeing the General Election campaign on TV today teach us?
1. David Cameron likes being seen with people behind in – continuing the pattern of events “in the round” with audience all around.
2. Gordon Brown likes being seen in front of a plain purple wall – that’s the common Labour backdrop at speeches and press conference, though some wheat got a look in once.
3. Samantha Cameron is doing more campaigning for the TV cameras than George Osborne – a case really of “Great wife, but not so sure about my Chancellor chap” from Cameron’s team.
Gordon Brown has today announced one of his election pledges: Labour has no plans to make our tax system fairer. Or has he put it: Labour will hold the basic income tax rate at 20 pence in the pound.
Lib Dems, too, are committed to keeping the basic rate of income tax at 20p. But, unlike Labour, the party would make a priority of lifting the personal tax allowance to £10,000, ensuring millions of low-earners and pensioners will stop paying taxes altogether.
a) Gordon Brown wants to be seen as a team player (hence massed ranks of Cabinet behind him for election announcement)
b) David Cameron wants to be seen as Barack Obama (hence shirt, rolled up sleeves and people behind him when he speaks!)
c) Nick Clegg wants to be seen with Vince Cable (hence Vince becomes the first non-leader to ever have his picture emblazoned on a party leader’s battlebus)
Tristan Ward “Let’s start by arguing that the economic benefits of the Single Market far exceed having to accept freedom of movement into the UK, and take it from there....
Chloe 'Needless to say the poorest in British society paid the price for this'
I remember canvassing , the poorer the area the less interested they were. Membership ...
GWYN WILLIAMS A balanced and fair assessment of the Senedd campaign. Unlike in Scotland, Wales has not as yet polarised into for and against Independence camps. The Welsh Lib...
Jana The logic of this article is that we should be rejoining the Single Market. That is different from signing up to complete political Union by joining the EU.
...
Pawel Urbanski Good piece, Tom. I would just split it into two things
1/ The principle: someone living off their assets should not pay less tax than someone living off a wage...
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20C night
Sammy Going South and the morality of employing child actors
Lessons from 1936 and 2026 for the Liberal Democrats (LDN#211)
Recipe for a real change of direction
Day 9304: So Farewell Then, Kier Starmer
Tristan Ward 
Chloe 
GWYN WILLIAMS 
Jana 
Pawel Urbanski 