Chancellor takes over as Prime Minister. Has brief burst of popularity. And then it all goes wrong. Sounds familiar?
A big problem for Gordon Brown is that he now seems firmly fixed in the media and public’s mind as someone who took over as Prime Minister, failed and is now in trouble. Once you’ve got a particular image, it’s very hard to shed, as former leaders from all political parties and testify.
But what’s particularly dangerous for Brown – and reminds me of John Major’s fate – is the way that the past is now coming back to bite him. Under both Blair and Thatcher the government behaved in all sorts of ways that political opponents derided, but which did relatively little harm to the government’s popularity amongst those it needed to win. But under Major – and now Brown – those past problems came back to haunt the government.
In Brown’s case many of these problems are personal. Under Tony Blair the Labour Party was deeply riven by personal animosities and disputes, including at times quite bizarre behaviour in the Blair-Brown relationship. It didn’t stop them winning three general election landslides – no mean achievement – but now these deep personal animosities are back, and feeding the media story of a government on its last legs and falling out.
Just take a quick flick through the Sunday newspapers – Charles Clarke being talked up as a stalking horse challenger, whispers of Jack Straw taking over as a caretaker leader, denials that Ed Balls has been setting himself up for a leadership challenge, and doom-laden prophecies of blood on the carpet if bad local elections results combine with crises over the abolition of the 10p tax rate and the attempts to introduce 42 days detention without trial.
As with John Major, is the only political future left to Gordon Brown now a constant struggle to keep the bad times at bay?
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5 Comments
Remembering John Major is to recall the virtues of watching cricket and reading slowly. He is a very different person from Gordon B. Are you suggesting that they are sufficiently similar for Gordon Bean to win the next election against the odds?
I’ve thought about this Browm/Major comparicon, I think the main difference is that the Conservative party now are in no way the Labour Praty of 1997. They were slick, organised, rigidly disciplined and voraciously hungry for power in a way that the Tories now simply don’t seem to be. They benefit from Browns’ troubles but there’s little sense of them making the political weather in the way that Blair, Campbell et al. did back in the day.
Gordon Brown has not (yet) got a sizeable chunk of his party regarding him with contempt as John Major had, I’m not sure, though, that the Tories need to be as slick as Labour were in 97: the old adage that ‘oppositions do not win elections; governments lose them’ was as true then as it could be in 2010. Even Michael Foot could have won in 97!
Painfully Liberal – a good point, but this does not mean that Gordon is not on par with Major in terms his own standing, just that whilst having an equally poor standing he is fortunate enough to be facing a less daunting main opposition. Clearly this difference means that a Tory landslide is out of the question, but Labour can still be facing two years of political implosion followed by some kind of GE defeat (which, of course, in our terms would hopefully involve a hung parliament).
John Major’s period of popularity lasted rather longer than GB’s 6 months or so. Also, whilst he did become unpopular, Major was generally more popular than the Tory party itself (by a couple of percentage points in polls). He wasn’t the problem. You get a sense with Labour right now that Gordon Brown is very much the problem.