Brown agonistes

[calimac]

Publication of the memoirs of Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Gordon Brown administration, has generated a new flurry of sputtering over how such a volcanically tyrannical fellow as Brown ever got to be Prime Minister in the first place. How could Tony Blair ever have left his seat for this fellow, why didn't his ministers bring him down, etc etc.

How easy it is to pigeon-hole. People forget that Blair actually wanted to support Brown for the Labour leadership in 1992, and what do you think might have happened if he'd run? Brown's loss of courage on that occasion prefigured his unfortunate (for him) decision not to call an election in 2007, when he could have won it. Blair's memoirs, for all their grievous faults, clearly explain his mixed feelings about a man who was an attractive political figure as well as an impossible colleague. Unfortunately, Blair, once he'd decided that Brown would not be able to handle the top job, made the same mistake that Winston Churchill made on coming to the same conclusion about Anthony Eden, who'd been his designated successor waiting in the wings for over a decade, as Brown was Blair's - and that was to keep putting off his planned retirement, without explaining why. But instead of causing the problem to go away, this only made the successor more impatient, making the situation worse when the changeover finally happened.

It's also clear to me why Darling and David Miliband, Brown's top ministers, decided against an attempt to depose him. Neither was strong or popular enough to beat him. If you strike at a king, you must aim to kill. It's the same reason Harold Wilson's unhappy ministers didn't attempt a coup in 1969; they would only have bloodied everybody and failed to bring him down. (The fall of Margaret Thatcher was quite a different situation. She wasn't embattled but brittle, and it only needed to be shown how brittle she was for the magic to vanish; and note that it wasn't her ministers who held the dagger, but resignatees with nothing to lose. There were none with the gravitas of Howe or the following of Heseltine under Brown. Robin Cook under Blair would have qualified, but even if he hadn't died by then, his moment had passed.)

Besides, it's usually a mistake for a party under fire to change its leader in a panic when an election is imminent. Look at the travails of the New Zealand Labour Party in 1989-90, desperately trying to save itself and only making its defeat more certain in the process, for an example of how to do it wrong. When it's that late, it's better to steady the course and hope for the best. Indeed, despite the massively unpromising political situation, Brown - like the Tories' Alec Douglas-Home in 1964, another figure whose political savvy is perhaps unfairly dismissed - did remarkably better in the election than the initial forecasts predicted and even almost won. Given that the dysfunctionality of his government was already known, that was a remarkable achievement, and suggests there really was more to him than a bad temper and a series of poor decisions.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting analogy with Churchill/Eden.

On Thatcher, it's interesting that her replacement wasn't Howe, Heseltine, Clark, or one of the other "big beasts", but her own creation, John Major - who'd spent the Ides of March at a dental appointment.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that nobody that I've seen has brought up the Churchill/Eden analogy before. I was puzzled by Blair's actions at the time, but as soon as I read his memoir, the exactness of the analogy astounded me.

True that Major was not just Thatcher's creation, but was seen - at the time - by both her and everyone else as her Mini-Me. Which explains his choice, as the Tories were still a Thatcherite party; it's just Thatcher herself they didn't want. But my point here is the flip side of this, that although Major (and Hurd) were as aware of Thatcher's weakness as anybody else, they made not one move to initiate bringing her down, any more than Darling or Miliband made in 2009, or Jenkins in 1969, or Butler in 1952, or even Churchill in 1940. Even Macmillan in 1956 was just positioning himself to be there when the bricks fell. Though there've been cases of cabinet wars that have led to the subsequent loss of an election, I can't think of a cabinet minister who played a major role in the fall of a UK PM since Baldwin in 1922, and no PM who resigned because of a mass cabinet revolt since Asquith in 1916.

This, I suppose, is why the plot to bring down Collingridge in House of Cards is carried out so intensely sub rosa. If it were at all open, it wouldn't have made a credible story.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

I had been vague thinking of rewatching House of Cards this last week. Now you've made me really want to take it off the shelf!