Entering the wilderness
I’ve been away for a while, rocking slowly backward and forward in the corner of a dark room, just wondering what happened to those glory days last year when Gordon Brown couldn’t seem to put a foot wrong.
Having been a Labour party member for just over a year, my spirits feel crushed.
It was always too good to be true. Even the most tribal Labourite, the most passionate supporter of Gordon’s could never have dreamed that their man – he with the famous great clunking fist – could have delivered such a bloody nose to the Tories.
But for a few weeks, whilst Blighty was subjected to an almost Biblical series of disasters, Gordo stood above politics, handling the crises with reassurance and resolve.
And then he bottled the election.
In years to come, we may well look back on Brown’s failure to call an election as the watershed moment in his premiership. The decision to postpone until 2009/10 wasn’t surprising, especially bearing in mind the Prime Minister’s legendary aversion to risk: the Government was not, even at that point, so far ahead in the opinion polls that even a half-way decent performance by Cameron at conference would avoid bringing the popularity difference back to within margin-of-error-territory. But the decision brought back to the fore those long-rooted suspicions about Brown – his famous ‘psychological flaws’.
We do not need to proceed through the litany of disasters that have beset the Government since then: I wouldn’t want to appeal to the schadenfreude of Tory friends and colleagues. But suffice it to say, Brown has proved a singularly inept people- and issue-manager in the last year. And this despite innumerable shake-ups to the Number 10 team, designed to inject a sense of strategic purpose into Government.
And so, on the eve of the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, where does that leave us? For Labour supporters, in a particularly unpleasant position. On the one hand, the party’s campaign in Crewe has been the nastiest I have ever had the misfortune to witness. And for that alone, Labour does not deserve to win. But on the other hand, a defeat would surely signal the death-knell for this Government, albeit one that will toll for at least another year before we finally get that election.
It needn’t have been like this. The Government still has a lot of credible, worthy ideas to realise and deliver. The blame cannot be placed entirely on Gordon’s shoulders, but one feels that had it not been for his visceral hatred of the Tories (a hatred Tony Blair never had), many of the short-termist, tactical and ultimately damaging initiatives the Government has proposed over the last eight months would never have seen the light of the day.
Ultimately, it is this hatred that has been Brown’s undoing, because it has made the Conservatives seem measured, considered and – shock horror – almost sensible in what few policy proposals they have come up with. It has also given them the space to start making preparations for Government, preparations which demonstrate the seriousness with which they regard their electoral prospects.
And who can blame them?