The last time I occupied this column, election fever was at its height and Gordon Brown was expected to go to the polls within weeks.
I predicted there would be no election this year or next. Emboldened by that success, I now offer another prediction: when Brown does hold an election, possibly as late as 2010, he will lose.
And here’s a third prediction. As Brown leaves Downing Street, that moment in the Commons earlier this month — when David Cameron challenged him to ‘look me in the eye’ and say he had thought of easing inheritance tax before the Tories thought of it — will still echo in our heads. At that instant, Cameron located Brown’s weakest spot and thus established a lethal advantage: the self-proclaimed conviction politician is nothing of the sort.
None of this is yet reflected in the opinion polls. Nor, in the near future, will it be. We have not had a moment comparable to 1992 when, in their handling of the Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis, the Conservatives lost in a single day a reputation for economic competence that had been built over a generation.
The polls do not show a decisive and consistent Tory lead. What does come out consistently is that voters’ views of the two leaders are still favourable to Brown. He is seen as a stronger leader than Cameron, more courageous, more trustworthy and more understanding of ordinary people. According to ICM, more than half the voters believe Brown will get it right on the economy against barely a quarter who believe Cameron can do so.
Yet Brown’s authority will, I believe, decline inexorably. His entire political persona is built on his supposed strength and courage. Once the voters start to believe he lacks those qualities, he becomes just a flinty, unsympathetic, uncharismatic Scotsman.
Blair could get away with insincerity. He was charming, cheeky and fleet of foot. His rootlessness was part of his appeal. He found no difficulty jettisoning Old Labour because he had never been part of it. He could not be accused of betrayal, because he was never a true believer.
Brown, however, has always been Old Labour to his bones; his political DNA, like the people’s flag, is deepest red. As Simon Jenkins puts it in his book Thatcher and Sons: ‘Brown’s aversion to Thatcherism in the 1980s and early 1990s was visceral. Blair’s was rather the war paint of his adopted tribe, easily washed off.’
Triangulation came naturally to Blair; in Brown’s hands, it looks clumsy and cynical. Triangulation is not, after all, just about splitting the difference between Right and Left. It is about rising above both viewpoints and embracing new policies that might appeal across the political spectrum. For example, Blair presented city academies not as a halfway house between state and private education but as a way of using the private sector to rescue comprehensive schools.
Brown doesn’t have the same talent for taking policy on to a new plane, largely because he doesn’t have the same conviction that it is the right thing to do. He has tried to construct two separate triangles but, in each case, has managed only unimaginative and rather inept compromises.
The first attempted triangle is in response to Conservative policies so that when Cameron proposes to raise the inheritance tax threshold, Brown also proposes to raise it, though not quite so far.
When Cameron hints that he will restrict immigration, Brown mysteriously and unlawfully promises ‘British jobs for British workers’.
The second attempted triangle — the dominant theme of Brown’s premiership so far — is designed as a response to Blair. City academies are retained, but they must work with local authorities. A-levels stay, but diplomas for 14 to 19-year-olds, which Blair rejected as a replacement for A-levels, are introduced alongside them. NHS reform goes on, but now it’s about ‘personalisation’, not ‘choice’ or ‘markets’. Support for the US continues, but Brown stands further away from President Bush at press conferences. The police are to get tougher powers against alleged terrorists, but the phrase ‘war on terror’ is dropped.
In the right hands, all this might appear as clever politics, and even be praised as a willingness to listen and compromise. But that is not what Brown is supposed to be about. What in another politician might be seen as flexibility becomes, in Brown’s case, mere weakness.
Like Dr Johnson’s dog standing
on its hind legs, Brown playing the role of listening politician is not done well and one is surprised to see it done at all.
Watching this performance, cruelly highlighted by a newly confident Conservative Party, the public will conclude that Brown is not in control of events. And that, as the precedents of Edward Heath in 1974, James Callaghan in 1979 and John Major in 1997 show, is fatal for any government.