May 30, 2008	Friday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 24, 1429

LONDON: It is horrible to watch. The old chief is sick but the tribe does not gather round to help. It does not offer him dignity in his apparent demise. It kicks him, gouges him, tears at his limbs, jeers at his record, taunts him to get up and fight back. When he does stagger to his feet, the knives flash and colleagues turn away. Et tu, Brute?

The Tories used to be the nasty party. Not now. The savagery being shown to Gordon Brown by the left defies anything hurled at the successors to Margaret Thatcher. Even as these leaders fought against hopeless odds, they could count on a praetorian guard who understood that loyalty was all and that the party had to live to fight another day.

A year ago, Labour chose Brown to succeed Tony Blair by acclamation. Though he was little known to the public, his courtiers assured us he was so good that there need be no leadership contest, no testing of alternatives, certainly no general election. After the bling of Tony and Cherie, there would be the clunk of Gordon, substance, seriousness and an eye for the long term. Bliss was it that dawn to be alive and a Brownite.

You have to pinch yourself to read the press just a year ago to grasp this edifice of self-delusion. Here is Brown “pulling down the curtain on celebrity politics”. Here is Brown “at the top of his political game” as he grapples with a terrorist bomb and a flood emergency. Here is “the mature statesman” in Washington, and here a reformer in the mould of Bagehot with his “constitutional package”. He has “rejuvenated Labour and sown panic in Tory ranks”, said one and almost all.

Much of this was from Labour politicians eager for preferment and Labour journalists eager for access. But there was more to it than that. The accolades were apparently an honest assessment by the left that Brown was the ideal response to the missed opportunities of the Blair era. He would put ideological spine back into the New Labour project.

Now what? An unappealing gimmick of the Westminster parliamentary lobby is the anonymous derogatory quote, banned by respectable American newspapers. Copy is spattered with “a senior cabinet minister ?” or “a leading backbench MP ?”, castigating the actions or prospects of close colleagues with no risk of self-revelation. Lobby journalists use this stylistic device without having to reveal their source supposing there is one.

Brown has this month (May) endured enough anonymous derogatory quotes to pass muster as St Sebastian. At least the Labour peer, Lord Desai, had the courage to attack him openly and a junior minister, Ivan Lewis, spoke of “the beginning of the end”. Others mutter behind their hands that things must improve or there will be that most ominous of political happenings, “rivals biding their time”.

I never thought Brown was a particularly good finance minister. He was initially lucky in his inheritance and adept at turning away blame. For 10 years, he remained near invisible in his Treasury bunker, terrified of moving even to the UK’s Foreign Office. He had no special qualities to bring to national leadership, for which he was clearly unsuited by temperament. He was tetchy, introverted and sour of countenance. His only qualification for Downing Street was his lust for it. After a sustained dose of Brown, I suggested, Blair’s Britain would seem a golden age.

Labour gobbled Brown whole and is now gagging on him. It never catalysed the Thatcher revolution, as Blair and Brown were forced to do in power, and thus never fashioned a critique that might have held the two in check. The left gorged itself on power and ignored the privatisation of public investment, the growing inequality, the crazed targetry, the corruption and centralisation of the Blair/Brown era. It naively bought the line that, at the end of the day, there would be “social justice”.

The left thought it could deplore the glitz and spin of Blairism without acknowledging that such personality projection was the “new politics”. It then pretended that by choosing Brown it could atone for its sin in choosing Blair, as if thereby restoring some vague ideological balance. This was an epic analytical blunder and the electorate appears to have rumbled it. Labour apparatchiks can only wander in a fog, murmuring about change and delivery.

If I were Brown I would tell the whole lot of them to get lost: “You acclaimed me, you voted for me, you wanted me and now you are going to have me, the full distance to 2010.” Since Blair made Labour’s leaders as impregnable as Castro, Brown’s position is very strong. He has never been overly concerned by the opinions, or interests, of his colleagues, and is unlikely to start being interested now. Instead he has an ideal opportunity to practise the old Trotskyite maxim, “weak is strong”.

The prime minister has extraordinary executive power and, on present showing, nothing to lose. Unless he needs specific legislation, he can make any decision he likes in the knowledge that, whatever else Labour MPs may do to him, they will not vote him out of power and precipitate an election.

Brown could do all the things I rather sense he would like to do. He could abandon the anti-terror plan of 42-day detention without charge, withdraw from Iraq and call the Olympians’ bluff by slashing the budget for London 2012. He could cancel the replacement of the Trident nuclear defence system, stop ID cards and kill the system that leads to IT contract in the health service, saving billions. He could tax those who have grown enormously rich under his regime and give generously to the poor. He could even honour his hoary old pledge to liberate local democracy and reinvigorate civic pride.

When Michael Bloomberg became New York mayor in 2001, he said he would be happy to serve just one term if he could be remembered as doing the right thing. He tried it, and promptly became the most unpopular mayor in history. Yet by 2005, his single-mindedness was recognised and he won popular re-election.

Wild horses will be needed to deliver Brown an election victory, but all the more reason for him not to waste time courting cheap popularity, such as his recent decision to make the law around cannabis more severe. If doing what he thinks will be popular makes him unpopular, why not take a chance and do what he thinks is right? It might even prove popular.—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service