Brown's woes

The principal domestic political story of the day is that, as The Sunday Times puts it, "Gordon Brown’s ratings in freefall":

Today’s YouGov poll of almost 1,500 people for The Sunday Times shows that the Tories are in their strongest position for more than 15 years with a 13-point lead. They are on 45%, compared with 32% for Labour and 14% for the Liberal Democrats. A month ago the figures were 41% for the Tories, 35% for Labour and 13% for the Lib Dems.... The poll also shows an unprecedented drop in Brown’s personal ratings. At the height of the Brown “honeymoon”, in August, the prime minister had a net approval rating of 48%, the difference between those saying he was doing a good job and those saying he was doing badly. In October, when he was agonising over whether to call an early election, his approval rating was still a healthy 30%. But it dropped to minus 10% last month and is down to minus 26% this month.

In The Sunday Telegraph, Martin Bright of The New Statesman has an interesting piece on how the PM is losing the support of the Left:

At Westminster the sense of doom is growing, and no single analysis of the causes of Labour's troubles seems entirely satisfactory. At one departmental Christmas party, a senior minister was openly asking journalists why things had gone so badly wrong.

One Sunday correspondent suggested it was the "election that never was" and the minister just stood shaking her head. "It can't be just that," she said. "I don't know what it is, but it can't be just that."

She is right, of course. We in the media like to identify neat turning points in the political narrative, but it doesn't quite work like that. The reality is that each crisis since the autumn has eaten away at Brown.

But some PMs can withstand pressure. Mrs Thatcher was fortunate in her enemies - General Galtieri and Arthur Scargill - yet she weathered crises, notably the Westland affair, almost undaunted. Tony Blair incurred unpopularity over the Iraq War, yet remained the dominant figure not only in British politics but also in Europe. Brown is not a statesman of that type. The overwhelming impression is that, having pressed for the Labour succession for many years, he has no idea now what to do with it. Some of his decisions - making the Defence Secretary a part-time role, for example - scream incompetence regardless of external circumstances. He is a lame PM at the head of a weak parliamentary party. (It's always graceless to claim foresight, but I never thought Brown was a plausible alternative or successor to Tony Blair, whose departure from Downing Street I intensely regret.)

Brown has no route out of this from abandoning the "triangulation" of British politics, where Labour sweeps the centre ground and ensures it can't be outflanked on defence or crime. But note what Martin says:

One former Blairite cabinet member, speaking from self-imposed purdah, told me: "It was always thought that Blair was the man of compromise and Gordon the man of principle, but it was really the other way around."

The loyalist Blairites always believed Gordon Brown was essentially a man of straw. But the Left, even the hard Left of the party, reserved their judgment. Brown was mistaken, in my belief, not to return the compliment.

When John McDonnell ran against him for the leadership, Brown and his people were utterly dismissive. In fact, whatever you think of McDonnell's politics, he ran a good campaign. Grassroots meetings he held across the country were packed with activists from the Left of the Labour Party and also with campaigners on the environment, asylum and workers' rights.

Gordon Brown has all but lost these people now. Indeed, my understanding is that the coalition which gathered around McDonnell this year has effectively decided to give up on the Labour Party and the parliamentary route to change.

Brown is not the weighty figure his supporters, especially those at The New Statesman, maintained. There are uncanny parallels with John Major - who at least spent a few weeks as Foreign Secretary, and thereby had more experience of the top posts of government than Brown before becoming PM. But the measure of Brown's failure is that the strategy Martin recommends (and which would have shown people like me that our hopes for New Labour were unfounded) might have been available to him; you can imagine his adopting it, whereas to Tony Blair it would have been inconceivable. John McDonnell, as I noted here, is unfit even to be a member of a democratic political party, let alone its leader. A plausible Labour leader would not only have dismissed McDonnell and his supporters but also denounced him and everything he stands for. Brown won't take Martin's strategy or mine. There is no direction or ideological ballast to this PM, and no purpose to him either.