Politics | 30 May 2009

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

The last thing any politician wants to be seen as at the moment is a defender of the political status quo. So this week we have had Alan Johnson’s call for PR and David Cameron’s ‘power to the people’ speech. The Prime Minister is expected to lay out his own reform agenda once the European election results are in. Brown loyalists hope that this will allow him to regain the initiative after what are expected to be a disastrous set of local and European election results for the government.

Alan Johnson’s call for PR was more about public relations than proportional representation. Johnson had actually first raised the issue of a referendum on PR in an interview with Independent readers two Mondays ago. But his comments failed to gain traction. So, he tried again the following Monday with an opinion piece in the Times. The paper wrote it up on the front page as a declaration of leadership intent. In case anyone had missed the message, Johnson then appeared on the World at One, where he dismissed questions about whether the article was designed to position him for the leadership with the line, ‘I wish I was that sophisticated.’

In truth, Johnson’s effort was extremely sophisticated. Labour morale has been destroyed by the fact that the party appears out of ideas, that it doesn’t make the political weather anymore. But here was a Labour Cabinet Minister setting the agenda, forcing the Tories to say whether they agreed or disagreed. This was not a Brown-style tactical dividing line but a political fault line Johnson was opening up between the party of reform and the defenders of the broken system. To a party that has been on the defensive for so long, it was invigorating. If any Labour MP was wondering what life would be like with Johnson as leader, they had just been given a taste.