Backbiting

An increasingly ugly mood in the Labour Party is suggested by The Sunday Times today:

GORDON BROWN was facing a backlash from Blairites this weekend for failing to set out an inspiring “vision” for new Labour and an “empty” conference speech.

With the Tories rampant after the prime minister’s decision not to call an autumn election, friends of Tony Blair disclosed he was “unhappy” with the direction in which Brown was taking the party.

Blair, who has been in the Middle East in his new role as a peace envoy, was said to feel Brown’s speech to the Labour conference was “empty” and to be “concerned about what new Labour stands for”.

“Tony feels Gordon should be defending new Labour,” said one confidante of the former prime minister. “But the trouble is that when he talks of change, it sounds like he means a break with the past and new Labour.

“Brown is defining himself not against Cameron but against Blair. One of the unstated reasons why the ‘young turks’ around Gordon wanted an early election was because they wanted a break with Blair.”

Other Blair allies are complaining about Brown’s “lack of vision”, with the government appearing to borrow policies from the Conservatives. “Labour has allowed there to be a policy vacuum,” said a former cabinet minister. “We’re not just policy lite; we are policy free.”

Two observations. First, anonymous and highly personal briefings against the Prime Minister are a worrying sign for a governing party. I hope we shall hear more of them as Labour languishes in the opinion polls. Just before Brown became PM, I was chatting to one political columnist whose general outlook is similar to my own. We agreed that next time we would doubtless vote Labour because... we were Labour. There didn't seem to be any other reason for favouring Brown against Cameron. But it would be truer to say that I'm Blairite, and will vote for the closest approximation to Blairism.

Secondly, the recently strengthened position of the Tories owes more to the decline of the Liberal Democrats than to any precipitate reversal in Labour's fortunes. I find this development encouraging. It ought to check the PM's inclination to distance himself from his predecessor's record. Whatever else you may say about Tony Blair, he is the most successful leader in Labour's history. The hostility he attracted from the commentariat was narrowly based. A Guardian/ICM poll in May, after Blair announced he would step down, showed his ratings remained high among Labour supporters and that he retained the respect of voters of all parties. It is also inherently a good thing that the Liberal Democrats are struggling. When Menzies Campbell became party leader, I was encouraged that patently the best man - from a Lib Dem standpoint - didn't win. But I still greatly overestimated the victor's competence. The party's decline in the past 18 months indicates, inter very much alia, how fallible is the judgement of political commentators. Campbell was once thought of as a politician of weight and intelligence. I don't think anyone quite realised how little he knew and how bad he would be at hiding it.

My own assessments of Lib Dem leaders have been as erratic as anyone's. I also overestimated Campbell's immediate predecessor, Charles Kennedy. Kennedy was plainly useless, but I recall with embarrassment that - without knowing the facts - I defended him against what I felt were unfair accusations against his drinking habits. We now know that Kennedy's condition rendered him regularly incapable of carrying out his leadership and parliamentary duties. The Liberal Democrats collectively deserve censure for hiding the truth. Finally, just for balance, the British politician I have most severely underestimated in the last 25 years was Kennedy's immediate predecessor, Paddy Ashdown. I discounted Ashdown almost as soon as he became an MP in 1983, when he spoke at a national CND demonstration against Nato's deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles. I also found his style of oratory absurdly grandiloquent for the leader of a party then running at half the level even of the Lib Dems' current miserable poll rating. Yet Ashdown presided over the eventual, messy integration of the Liberals and the SDP. He abandoned his anti-nuclear stance. He perceived that Tony Blair was something different in British politics and that the Conservatives after 1992 were an irredeemably discredited force. Most creditably, and (so I hear from well informed sources) to dissent within his own party, he was early and right in drawing attention to the appalling consequences of failing to rebuff the genocidal aggression of Slobodan Milosevic.

British politics was transformed in the 1990s by the Tories' chronic incompetence and - not to be sentimental about it - John Smith's premature death and Tony Blair's succession. Labour and the Lib Dems are now worse led, and the Tories better led. Given the first of those circumstances, I am relieved at the second and third.