Labour’s behaviour reminds me of the blind football at the Paralympics
The party’s MPs are fatally conflicted over Gordon Brown’s leadership, says Rod Liddle. Their craven conduct reflects the awkward fact that they overwhelmingly chose him in the first place There was an interesting story in the newspapers this week about an American dog which rang 911, the emergency services, when his owner had a seizure. The details were a little hazy; we know that the dog was a German shepherd, but we do not know his or her name. Nor was it clear whether the animal used a landline to summon assistance, or if it had its own mobile phone. According to the emergency services, the dog, having successfully contacted 911, then rather let the side down by merely whimpering into the receiver, rather than providing the ambulance crew with a clear and concise description of what afflicted its owner, time at which the illness presented, pulse rate of victim, medication the dog might or might not have already provided to its master, etc. Whimpering is not really good enough in such a situation and one hopes that this important message will be conveyed to the creature, allied to some form of punishment, perhaps via a cane. A little harsh, I hear you say — but remember: a dog, a woman, a walnut tree, the more you beat ’em, the better they be — as the old West Country saying goes.
The Labour party has been behaving, of late, rather like a dog which has had the wherewithal to dial up the emergency services but, once connected, can do little more than whimper into the receiver. In fact, there have been plenty of news stories this week which, through only the mildest leap of the imagination, call to mind the predicament and behaviour of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The exciting qualifying games for the Paralympic blind football tournament, for example — except in Labour’s case, the ball with which they are inexpertly playing does not have a useful little bell in it. So it’s just lots of people running around with a purposeful purposelessness, hacking out right, left and centre. They have a notion of what they would like to do, but scarcely any idea of how it should be done.
The risk occasioned by doing nothing to remove Gordon Brown from 10 Downing Street increases every day, as the opinion polls show their party lagging ever further behind — 21 per cent at the latest count, which would wipe out a good 150 seats. But the risk of taking proper action remains, for the moment, slightly higher still; the unconstitutional nature of changing a Prime Minister twice without consulting the public will count heavily against them, and there is no certainty that a new leader will be any more kindly received than Gordon Brown, especially if it’s David Miliband.
And so we have a succession of small creatures whimpering into the telephone receiver — including Labour’s ‘forestry envoy’, Barry Gardiner. You didn’t know Labour had a forestry envoy, did you? Barry’s job, until Tuesday this week, was to make sure that Britain’s vibrant community of trees were happy, fulfilled and truly felt part of a dynamic, diverse but holistic society in which their own cultural differences — many of them very real — were taken into account. There have also been minor whips, the former home office minister George Howarth and various other people the public has never heard of. It has been said that this is a cunning Machiavellian plan to allow a carefully controlled drip of dissent from ever more prominent members of parliament. But I suspect it reads to the electorate — or those members of it who bother to take notice — as a timorous rabble of infant-aged children forever pushing one another forward saying: ‘No, you tell him! I’ll tell him later. In a bit.’ There’s Charles Clarke too, of course — but then there always is, baleful and perpetually transgressed. Brown has responded, apparently, by sacking those who transgress but not rubbishing them the way he rubbished Miliband earlier in the summer. And every day there is the whisper that someone more prominent might poke their heads above the parapet; today the forestry envoy, tomorrow the minister for shrubberies.
You feel for them, these MPs facing annihilation and quite unable to do anything about it, or anything that will make a difference. They were, in the end, delighted to see Blair depart, sick and tired of the cosmetic attractiveness of the man, of the spin and the control. Now they have as a leader someone who is cosmetically extremely unattractive, who has always eschewed spin (and when he’s had a go at it, shown a laudable ineptitude for the art). And who has, it would seem, pretty much no control over anything, except perhaps his own bodily functions. That was precisely what they wanted, most of them, a man who did not much care for the gifts which our previous prime minister rated most highly; one assumes it is also what they thought the public wanted.
As Charles Clarke wrote recently, there is nothing ideological in the odium being flung at Gordon Brown by members of his own parliamentary party: indeed, it is a simple matter of style. If there were an ideological divide, then it would be easy for the PLP to take action; instead, the overwhelming majority of the PLP seemed to wish Gordon Brown to have the job he currently holds and therefore requires a massed chorus of mea culpa. Even those most frequently expressed charges flung at Brown — he dithers or vacillates and he is not a good communicator — can easily be turned on their heads. You mean he waits and considers, rather than taking precipitate action out of a wish to be seen as ‘decisive’? You mean he is devoid of the slick PR skills of his predecessor?
The truth is that Gordon Brown is matching up to what the PLP — and the rest of the Labour party, for that matter — wanted even more in his perceived failings than in those things they thought he’d be dead good at, such as holding a prudent stewardship over the economy. They wanted Gordon Brown to lead their party and to become Prime Minister precisely because of those ‘faults’, rather than in spite of them. And they thought — just as did I, as it happens — that the country quite fancied that, too.
My guess is that it will take a good 30 point deficit and a worsening of our current economic crisis before the dog barks with clarity into the open telephone.
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