Almost as striking as the Tory silence the total incoherence of the Labour Left
PETER ()BORNE
0 ne of the most important political developments of the last ten years has been the abject failure of the Labour Left. Though never remarked upon, the absence of a strong and coherent left-wing voice has been of great moment. Ever since its birth, the Labour movement has been defined as much by a romantic tradition of eloquent rebels as by its leaders; think of Aneurin Bevan and Attlee, or Michael Foot and Harold Wilson. Foot and Bevan were incomparable: masters of oratory, capable of inspiring mass emotion or destroying an enemy with a phrase.
One would have expected Tony Blair of all Labour leaders — coming from the Right of the party and always open to charges of betrayal — to have generated his antithesis, as Attlee generated Bevan. But he has not done so. There is a disaffected left-wing in the Labour party, but it is a shadowy, incoherent rump. No great man or woman has emerged to give it shape or purpose. There are men of obvious decency, like the agonised Nottingham MP Alan Simpson. There are men with a spark of brilliance, like George Galloway. There are men of mischief, like the QC Robert MarshallAndrews. But the whole is much less than the sum of the parts. There is no organisation to provide discipline and drive. Attempts to provide one, through the Cam paign Group or Tribune now being revived by Ian Davidson, Gordon Brown's back-bench organiser — have failed. The failure of the Left to find a method of taking on Tony Blair is as noteworthy as the inability of the Tories to find a voice in opposition.
Both political tragedies were on display when the Commons was recalled to debate Iraq on Tuesday. A ragged 53 Labour rebels voted against the government motion, and there was a handful of powerful speeches, by Galloway, Tam Dalyell and others. But most were barely articulate, in some cases bordering on half-witted. There was no sense of will. The organisational drive and ruthlessness which were such urgent features of the Left under previous Labour governments has been appropriated by No. 10, This is a mysterious process which cries out for more research. New Labour has been far more unscrupulous than any previous government about using the powers of the Prime Minister to assert dominance. Its leading figures gained a clear-sighted, Marxist understanding of power in the desperate struggles of the 1970s. Though they have since forgotten much of the associated communist dogma, they have retained the methodology. It was all on display last week: the careful use of selective information (the Evening Standard hoardings screamed all day `Saddam's Nuclear Secrets Revealed' — closer inspection showed that the only secret was that there were no nuclear secrets); the marginalisation or smearing of political opponents, the masterful use where necessary of House of Commons procedure to suppress debate. The old-fashioned Labour Left, by contrast, has forgotten everything that once made it such a spectacular, if sinister, force.
The same observation applies to the Tories. They no longer know how to oppose, and last week's debate demonstrated the problem. The image of a puce Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, jabbing his hand at the jeering Conservative benches and furiously stating We are only asking the questions that the official opposition have failed to ask', will endure. Kennedy was putting his finger on a growing anxiety on the Tory benches, and one that came to a head at the meeting of the 1922 Committee on Monday night. There, in committee room 14, a number of voices, led by the former agriculture minister Douglas Hogg, elaborated on the point made by John Major in his interview on the Today programme last week. They wanted lain Duncan Smith to ask more probing questions about the onset of an Iraq war, the kind that Charles Kennedy put to the Prime Minister on Tuesday afternoon. The shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram dealt with the flurry as best he could, though it is possible that the asperity behind the questions owed something to a wider dissatisfaction with the leadership of lain Duncan Smith.
But the Tory leader stands where he stands on Iraq, His Commons performance, while unexciting, was at least of a piece with everything that he has ever said or believed. His strategy of supine support for Tony Blair may
cost him less than critics fear. Think back to the FRM debacle. Labour was totally implicated in the policy collapse, had strongly supported British membership at the start, and endorsed it again at the general election of spring 1992. John Smith and Gordon Brown, the shadow chancellor, did not have to pay any price for their miscalculation — quite the opposite — but it destroyed the government. There are faint signs that this syndrome could repeat itself. Tuesday's ICM poll for the Guardian suggested that the unpopularity of the Iraq War was beginning to dig into New Labour popularity. The government's rating fell to 39 per cent, while the warlike Tories rose to 34 per cent, within five points of the government, their best performance since the fuel crisis. Kennedy's Liberal Democrats, who theoretically should have been the beneficiary, failed to make progress.
But the most gripping struggle remains on the Labour side. There is that long-standing job vacancy, for leader of the Left. Last Tuesday, as the Prime Minister read out the complicated technical details relevant to Iraqi rearmament, Robin Cook stared at the ceiling. The Leader of the House is not liked in No. 10, and there is now talk of a large Cabinet reshuffle next summer, which he would be most unlikely to survive. It must very often cross Cook's mind that it would be better to leave on his own terms. Cook, a disappointment in some ways in government, was utterly formidable in opposition, as the Tories discovered during the arms-toIraq affair. With his precision intellect and acid tongue, he would be a lethal enemy for Tony Blair as well. A few yards to Cook's left sat Clare Short, arms folded, aloof. Clare Short has grown in office, and gained a powerful ally in Gordon Brown. She too could inflict formidable damage.
The Prime Minister secured the backing of Cook and Short at Monday night's Cabinet by laying stress on the United Nations and the search for international backing for the war, But one question continued to hang in the air, both after the Cabinet meeting and after the Commons debate the following day: are there circumstances when Britain will defy the United Nations and world opinion and follow George Bush to war, even if Saddam co-operates? No hard answer has emerged. But the impression remains that such circumstances most certainly exist; and if they occur, the Labour Left will no longer want for a leader.
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