A Labour conference would not be the same without a debate over its leader, but not since 1982 has the party been so scared of electoral defeat

"Am I being too pessimistic?" A usually up-beat cabinet minister turns to his special adviser during our conversation about Labour's prospects, wondering whether even he has succumbed to the bleak polls and hostile media coverage. "No, I think you are painting the true picture," the adviser replies. "It's what you believe."

The picture as the minister saw it was that the Conservatives were more vulnerable than they seemed, and in policy terms the government had a decent story to tell, but Labour was running out of time and Gordon Brown had used up all, or nearly all, of his opportunities to change the game. Labour had lost the media and the government's economic message was complicated to convey, more so when dissenting voices were grabbing the headlines and some colleagues had given up the fight. The minister need not have worried about his pessimism. His was one of the more ebullient assessments from senior Labour figures in the build-up to the party's annual conference.

For the first time since 1982, Labour gathers for a pre-election conference fearful that it might be slaughtered when the voters deliver their verdict in a few months' time. In the build-up to the 1987 and 1992 elections, there were varying degrees of misplaced optimism in Labour's ranks. More recently, the party's pre-election conferences looked forward to another inevitable triumph at the polls. No one will accuse Labour of giddy euphoria as it contemplates the forthcoming election.

Fear is not the only emotion running through a battered and bewildered party as it reflects on gloomy opinion polls. Instead, fear is fuelling a range of responses. Some cabinet ministers are determined to mount one last fightback, clinging to an economic message they believe to be more potent, credible and in line with the international mainstream than the one that David Cameron and George Osborne will deliver to their party in Manchester the following week. A few left-of-centre pressure groups hope to persuade the leadership to adopt radical measures in what might be the final months in power. Others are in a more conspiratorial mood, planning the removal of Brown, or at least talking about the possibility. There is more energy around compared with the lifeless summer, when politics collapsed under the weight of the so-called scandal of MPs' expenses. But that energy is diverted in a thousand different directions.

Will he stay or will he go now?

Even if some of the younger activists are not used to a pre-election conference in which Labour is well behind in the polls, they should be prepared for the accompanying speculation about a possible change of leadership. A Labour conference would not be a Labour conference without seething questions over its leader. A year ago, Brown's future was an overwhelming theme. This year, talk about his leadership is similarly intense.

The speculation about coups and change at the top is part of a pattern. Since at least 2004, the build-up to each of Labour's annual gatherings has been dominated by battles over the leadership. For years, Brown and his entourage regarded the conference as a pivotal event in their long march to No 10 and in their internal battles over policy with Tony Blair. Similarly, Blair's allies briefed as intensively in the build-up to conference about his determination to stay in power in order to implement "radical reforms". The cuttings from past Labour conferences accurately reflect a febrile mood. Should Blair go? Will he go? Would Brown make his move? Should he make his move? Labour has not been at ease with its leader for a long time, whoever that leader happens to be.

When a party is in a state about its leader, and wonders persistently whether someone else could do a better job, then it is in crisis. The issue is never just about the performance of the leader. On this basis, Labour has been in crisis for some time. When Blair was at the helm, a significant section of the party wanted Brown in charge, including Brown himself. Now Brown leads, a section of an as-yet indeterminate size wants him out, to be replaced by Alan Johnson, the most reluctant leader-in-waiting in the history of British politics - so reticent that, if elected, his opening words on the doorstep of No 10 would probably be: "I really don't want to be prime minister. Thank you and good night."

Labour's long-term restlessness is not an excuse for Brown's epic flaws, but the two are in some ways connected. Neither the leader nor the party has a clear sense of publicly defined purpose. Both are deeply troubled.

When the Conservatives were in disarray, they were incapable of electing their only popular candidate, Ken Clarke, and instead held a series of deranged leadership contests in which the least suitable figure emerged as a winner. From 1997 to 2005, much of the focus was on William Hague and his baseball cap, Iain Duncan Smith and his comically contrived attempts to acquire authority, and Michael Howard and his inadvertent capacity to remind voters of the Conservatives' role as a nasty party. But these unfortunate leaders were symptoms of a party in crisis, not the
cause. Strange things happen when a party loses its identity. At one particularly mad juncture, Clarke teamed up with the Eurosceptic John Redwood in the hope of offering their party a dream ticket. Their unworkable combination served only to emphasise that their party had strode to the crazed margins of British politics.

With good cause, Labour laughed. "These people are weird," Blair once said of the Conservatives and their antics. Yet, more recently, Labour has started to behave weirdly too. Remember the calls from Labour MPs for Blair to go immediately after he had led them to a third successive election victory in 2005, a bizarre sequence. Then there was the so-called September coup against Blair the following year, in which he was forced to leave at a time of his choosing, another wacky contortion. In 2007, Labour staged a leadership contest with only one candidate.

Shapeless coups, contests that are not really contests and noisy, dissenting voices in the immediate aftermath of victory are vivid signs of a party without self-confidence or a sense of identity; an inevitable consequence of New Labour's deliberately ill-defined project - one that aimed to fill a big tent of supporters with conflicting values and objectives, seeking an impossible third way that would please them all.

As a result of that original extreme pragmatism, the party was always destined for bewildered introspection when the opinion polls turned. Under Blair's leadership, its identity became increasingly blurred, symbolised most potently when Cameron supported his public service reforms with an enthusiasm that was genuine as well as tactically astute. Since taking over as Prime Minister, Brown could never decide whether to break with Blairite politics or to continue with a similar style of political cross-dressing. Perhaps without winning an election on his own, he felt in too weak a position even to contemplate a decision. Instead, he has triangulated weakly in ways that have rebounded on him disastrously - the most conspicuous examples being the abolition of the 10p tax rate to pay for an income tax cut, and the attempt to extend the length of time a suspect can be detained without charge.

The past bites back

There is a bigger theme here. In a dark, almost symmetrical manner, all the haunted contortions Blair and Brown went through to purge Labour of its vote-losing past returned to produce their own near-fatal crises.

Partly because, in the 1980s, Labour was seen as anti-American and weak on defence, Blair's political instinct was always to support America in its wars. Indiscriminately proud of his close ties with business leaders, a bond that showed Labour was no longer anti-business, Blair became embroiled in the cash-for-honours nightmare. Keen to prove that New Labour had learned from old Labour's heavy-handed interventionism of the 1970s, Brown lightly regulated the financial markets when he was Chancellor, and cited the bankers' approval as vindication of his economic policies.

Now Brown is stuck with the war in Afghanistan and even the Sun newspaper attacks him over it. Bankers are viewed with disdain and Brown is condemned for failing to regulate the markets more intensively.

The search for purpose

At a time of identity crisis, a search inevitably begins for clearer definition. Consequently, while pre-election discipline is normally rigid, internal divisions are becoming more public. The prominent Labour MP Jon Cruddas highlighted an important one in his Compass lecture earlier this month, as he dissected different meanings of the term "liberal", the woolliest and most flexible adjective in British politics. He contrasted the dismal laissez-faire liberalism that "assumes a model of human behaviour that is acquisitive and self-interested" with a "more 'fleshed out' liberalism
defined by the sense of a common good". He argued that New Labour combined parts of both, the good and bad traditions. At its best, the government had strengthened public services and sought to end social exclusion. But, "in its restricted understanding of the scope for change, New Labour betrayed the cynical assumptions of its hollowed-out alter ego . . . equating aspiration with nothing more than crude acquisitiveness". He warned that in the party's internal debate, either form of liberalism could prevail.

Away from the increasingly active Compass, the debate within Labour is on a more subterranean level. A few of the younger cabinet ministers place a fresh emphasis on constitutional reform partly as a means of reconstructing the elusive progressive consensus, an aspiration that also evades clear definition. There is much talk behind the scenes and to some extent in public about the role of the state and how a centre-left party should adapt in more straitened times. Localism is back in fashion in some ministerial quarters, at least in theory. Empowerment of the individual is another popular theme. In both cases, the means towards fashionable ends remain vague. "Power to the People" is a great populist slogan. Who is going to enter an election campaign arguing that power should be taken away from the people? Turning the words into reality is much more complex, as the Conservatives will discover if they win the next election.

In the search for purpose and momentum, there are some tentative signs that the lessons of New Labour's ambiguous defensiveness are being learned. Over the summer, the government announced radical policies on the environment, schools, elderly care and for public services. All of them imply a more innovative but still important role for the state in the way it connects with individuals' lives. The government will also enter the next election at a point when high earners will pay a new 50 per cent top rate of income tax. After a summer of fraught discussions between Brown, Peter Mandelson, Alistair Darling and Ed Balls, the government has a coherent and partially compelling tale to tell about its approach to "tax
and spend" before, during and after the recession. It is an approach that is incomparably more credible than the Conservatives' policy, one that called for spending cuts during the recession. The government thus contemplates tentatively a bolder agenda than the one brought forward by a timid, inexperienced administration in 1997, when virtually the entire country hailed a new radical dawn.

Few notice now. The prism through which politics is viewed determines perceptions. Opinion polls and the performance of the leader shape the prism. No one is more painfully aware of this than Brown and, from a different perspective, his internal critics. The polls are terrible for Labour, and Brown's public performances have been lacklustre, as if the effort of trying so hard moves him close to the point where he cannot disguise his gloomy, frustrated, exhausted irritation. There was some hope in No 10 that, after a difficult August for the Conservatives, the polls would show a narrowing of the gap. Instead, they suggested public opinion remained as hostile to Labour, and Brown in particular, as it was before the summer break.

A dramatic resolution

This means that Brown's conference speech is again an event of some significance. Drafts of the speech were doing the rounds in No 10 and beyond by the end of August. They have been the subject of unusually direct discussion with a few aides. Allies have told Brown candidly that there will be people in the Brighton conference hall willing him to succeed when he speaks, and others hoping he will flop. Either way, they say he must acknowledge openly in the speech that his leadership is an issue. Apparently the aim is to make the speech more personal - not in a corny style, which Brown could never pull off, but in a way that seeks to make sense of the past two extraordinary years, which were so dramatically different to anything contemplated as he ached to replace Blair for more than a decade. His more optimistic aides point out that last year's speech - "no time for a novice" - was something of a game-changer. The sequel needs to be at least as good, and perceived as such, if Brown is to move on to other daunting pre-election hurdles free from a debilitating level of speculation about his future.

There have been more febrile build-ups to a Labour conference, but not one in which so many different hopes and fears collide. Some hope for a hung parliament after the election, confident that the weaknesses of the Conservatives will be exposed. Others fear a slaughter for Labour that will be even greater than the defeat suffered under Michael Foot in 1983. Some sniff the air and detect no great ideological sea change in a rightwards direction. Others wonder whether Labour will survive as a political force. Some are convinced Brown will not lead Labour into the election. Others are more or less certain that he will. A dramatic resolution of all these conflicting emotions and aspirations is not far away.

Steve Richards is chief political commentator of the Independent and a contributing editor of the New Statesman

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website