As I rose from my seat to get off the train at Blackpool during the 2005 conference season, the grey-haired Scottish gent sitting opposite me decided to give me the benefit of his wisdom for the first time during the long journey from London. He had heard me talking on my mobile phone about the all-pervasive gloom of the Labour Party despite the general election victory, and told me not to be so negative. This Scot, who fancied himself as something of a Labour soothsayer, had a three-part prediction: “Gordon Brown to be prime minister within two years, Des Browne and Douglas Alexander to become senior figures in the cabinet, and Labour elected at the next election with an increased majority.”
Perhaps I should have put a bet on. At the time, remember, Tony Blair had not clarified when he would be leaving office. There was even speculation he would stay on to the bitter end of the third term, with some ultra-Blairite commentators urging him to renege on his agreement not to seek a fourth term. Douglas Alexander was Europe minister, unknown to most of the public; as for Des Browne, he was chief secretary to the Treasury, but not seen as an influential figure.
Blairites were still sniping about Gordon Brown’s suitability as a future Labour leader and few imagined the chancellor would stand for election unopposed. Charles Clarke was still home sec retary and his candidacy for the leadership was still a real possibility. There was the sneaking feeling that Brown would be Labour’s “nearly man”, who would have the ultimate prize snatched from him. The depiction of Brown as a Shakespearean tragic hero, attributed to Jona than Powell, took on a real resonance.
Within days of my snatched conversation on the train, David Cameron had wowed the Conservative party conference with a speech that allowed him to leapfrog David Davis in the leadership race. The Tories began to believe that they had finally found a winner.
I dismissed my Caledonian seer as one of Labour’s Brownite faithful with no view of the bigger political picture. He is the one smiling now. Two polls in recent days have given Labour a solid lead, cementing a strong revival in the first month of the new Brown government. The recent by-election results in Ealing Southall and Sedgefield were little short of catastrophic for the Tories, who fell from second to third place in Blair’s former constituency and failed to make any gain in west London, despite the attentions of Cameron himself.
One senior Brownite MP said that even those around the Prime Minister have been surprised by quite how well things have gone. “If you had told me that four weeks after Gordon took over we would be six points ahead in the polls, I wouldn’t have thought that was really possible,” he said. The result in Ealing Southall has calmed Labour nerves. In the days running up to the poll, the party was very worried about the personal attention that Cameron had been giving to the seat (and the campaign money that went with it). Following the leaking of postal votes, which seemed to suggest the Tories and Labour were neck-and-neck, one cabinet minister I spoke to said the seat was not considered to be in the bag.
Brown would be unwise to draw national conclusions from two constituencies with such specific local circumstances. But there is certainly no evidence that public hostility towards the Blair government has translated into a pro-Tory sea change in British politics.
Those in Cameron’s inner circle are known to have made a minute study of new Labour’s rise to power. It cannot have escaped their attention that during this period it became impossible for the Conservatives to hold on to a seat. In December 1994 Ian Pearson won the Dudley West by-election with a 29 per cent swing, the largest for 50 years. Veteran activists also remember the Staffordshire South-East by-election of April 1996, when Labour won with a swing of 22 per cent, and Wirral South in February 1997, when Labour took the seat from the Conservatives with a swing of 17 per cent. In fact, between John Major’s election victory of 1992 and the Labour landslide of 1997 the Conservatives failed to hold a single seat, losing four to the Liberal Democrats and one to the Scottish Nationalists on top of the three they lost to Labour.
Rebranding exercise
Cameron’s team have liked to see themselves as mirroring the renewal of Labour under Brown and Blair. Their bible, famously, is The Unfinished Revolution, by Blair’s polling guru Philip Gould. Unfortunately for them, there is no chapter in the book about what to do when you have a serious setback. Blair might had a few squalls (the furore over grant-maintained and grammar schools, for example), but his very mission or grip was never challenged while he was in opposition. Brown’s circle now jokes that Cameron’s Conservatives have more in common with Neil Kinnock’s Labour of the late 1980s than the Blair-Brown model of the mid-1990s – a rebranding exercise, rather than a genuine shift to the centre ground.
Most worryingly for Cameron, even some of the new-generation Tories agree with this assessment. One rising star of the party, still looking for a seat at the next election, says: “We are too fat and too rich and we look like we don’t give a shit.” There are even whispers within the party that Cameron himself is looking too chubby, despite all the cycling. “We don’t look like we want it. We are quite literally not hungry enough,” the source said. The same younger Tories have been forced to recognise the talent of Brown’s phalanx of young lieutenants. Man for man, pound for pound, they say, the shadow cabinet is roughly five years older and half a stone heavier.
The real problem is one of authority. At Conservative HQ, nobody quite knows who is in charge, so no one takes responsibility when something goes wrong. It has still not emerged precisely who was responsible for putting the words “David Cameron’s Conservatives” on the ballot paper at Ealing Southall. Meanwhile, his trip to Rwanda, though admirable in principle, has made the Tories look as if they are indulging in the politics of the gap year: rich kids earnestly looking like they are making a difference, while Britain sinks under the flood water.
The Brown honeymoon period has now lasted a month, long enough to take the Prime Minister through to the summer recess. In that time, the new man has had to deal with a major terrorist incident and, in the floods, a national emergency. So far he has ridden his luck – the terrorists did not get through and he has not been blamed for the floods, despite cuts to flood defences that might have been laid at his door. His closest allies claim this is due to the new approach to cabinet government, where responsibility, and blame, are shared. The belief is that had Brown adopted his predecessor’s approach and announced he was taking personal charge, he would have been held responsible for every last sandbag. Instead, Hilary Benn has been allowed to take the lead, and the Environment Secretary’s presence at Brown’s first monthly press conference was a sign of the new approach. In the response to the floods, though, there are indications of potential banana skins. Brown’s instinct for reflection meant he did not react as quickly as he should have done when the rains first hit the north of England. When the second wave hit the south, he was given the chance to show he could act decisively. However, the conclusions of an independent review on the floods could yet damage Brown.
Brown’s inner circle has been surprised at its good fortune in these first four weeks of the new regime. I am told there was huge concern during the transition period in May and June that not enough emphasis was being put on hammering out the details of new policy, because so much time was being spent on arranging the mechanics of the government (squaring the announcement of new constitutional arrangements with Buckingham Palace, putting in place a series of advisers, preparing the split of the old Home Office and Department for Education).
Downing Street has therefore been delighted that the slew of policy statements on housing, health, education and transport has been generally well received. Reviews of policy on casinos, drugs and 24-hour licensing have gone down well with Brown’s friends at the Daily Mail. There is disappointment among aides that more attention was not paid to shifts from the Blair era (the emphasis on doctors being given increased input into hospital restructuring, for example, and changes to tuition fees to allow more children from poor families to receive grants). But without the Blair-era advance briefings of the media, perhaps this is no surprise.
In areas where Brown has limited experience, such as security and foreign affairs, some aspects of policy remain fuzzy (as Misha Glenny reports on page 15). Proposals to extend the 28-day period that terrorism suspects can be held without charge, which formed the centrepiece of Brown’s statement to parliament on 25 July, are designed to outflank the Tories and make the new PM look tough on terror.
Attention will now turn to grass-roots campaigning, with MPs being told to return to their constituencies over the summer and put themselves on an election footing. This means not that a snap autumn poll is imminent, but that Brown is convinced the fight needs to be taken to the Tories on the ground. To this end, Douglas Alexander has been holding a series of seminars on campaigning with MPs. At the last meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Ed Balls outlined plans for a late-summer surge on edu cation policy around the constituencies. This will concentrate on initiatives to persuade all children to stay on at school until the age of 18, which the new Schools Secretary is convinced provides the key to tackle educational underachievement. A similar surge on health will follow. Although MPs are to be permitted a holiday in August, they will be expected to be back to begin campaigning well in advance of parliament returning in October. September will be considered a working month, with regular cabinet meetings and Brown emphatically in the UK, keeping his foreign travels to a minimum.
For the first time in years, MPs on the Labour benches are leaving for the long break with a spring in their step. They know that the honeymoon cannot last for ever. As one Brown aide said: “If the terrorist attacks or the floods had been handled badly or the by-elections had gone the other way, then things could be looking very different now.” But the atmosphere could not be further removed from the dark days of late September 2005. Even with boundary changes that could snip up to 20 seats from Labour at the next election, victory is now within reach again.
Two of the prophecies of the Brownite seer I met on the train that day have come true. The third, an increased majority, still looks remote indeed, but some MPs have begun to allow themselves to dream.
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