If there is anything that can bring Gordon Brown a shred of comfort, it is that almost no one in the Labour party is now speculating about his future. There is no shortage of plotting in the bars, tearooms, corridors and urinals of the House of Commons. But what happens to the Prime Minister himself is a subject of negligible interest. He is universally expected to lose the next election and then be gone. Labour MPs are focused on a far more sombre matter: the coming battle not just for the party’s soul, but its very survival.
This is the key to understanding a run of political stories that might otherwise be baffling. Why is Lord Mandelson so brazenly insistent on privatising the Post Office but nationalising banks? Why is Harriet Harman talking about changing the law to claw back a banker’s pension that was approved by other ministers? Why, indeed, is Harriet Harman talking — and why do we listen? Why is Ed Balls making pronouncements on the economy at a Labour Yorkshire conference? It only makes sense when seen through the prism of the Labour leadership battle. Almost the entire Cabinet is on manoeuvres.
To play Labour’s game of mental chess, one must first imagine what the party’s post-electoral chess board might look like. Almost half of today’s players will probably have been swept away. The opinion polls suggest that Alistair Darling, Jacqui Smith, John Hutton, Jim Murphy and at least 125 other Labour MPs will be gone, and with them a large part of the moderate, Blairite wing of the party. The surviving Labour party will look and sound much closer to Kinnock’s tribe than to Blair’s movement. Trade unions will probably be keeping Labour alive financially, and will have an incredible opportunity to remould the party.
To Lord Mandelson, this is anathema. He has a deeply held and underappreciated love for his party, expressed by his almost Shintoist worship of his grandfather, Herbert Morrison. It is said that of the three architects of ‘New Labour’, only Lord Mandelson truly believed in the phrase: Tony Blair only liked the first word, and Mr Brown only liked the second. Mandelson’s final mission in politics, after his unexpected return, is to protect the pilot light of the New Labour project from the many reaching to extinguish it.
Hence the totemic importance of the Post Office privatisations. Lord Mandelson sees this as an impeccably New Labour measure: to abandon it during the recession would imply that Blairism was a fair-weather doctrine. A rival theory is doing the rounds among Labour’s Left: that Lord Mandelson’s covert aim is to provoke the unions into cutting financial ties with the party once and for all, as some have threatened to do if the legislation is passed. This, runs the theory, would leave him free to remould a post-election Labour party with minimal interference — though with no immediately obvious source of funding.
Whether or not Lord Mandelson is indeed pursuing a devious plot of this sort, it is significant in itself that some on the Left believe it to be true. For many more of the rebels, in marginal seats, the Post Office vote is simply a chance to distance themselves from an unpopular government. As John Major found in 1996 (and arguably even earlier) there comes a point when electorally vulnerable MPs (in Labour’s case, about half of the parliamentary party) start to focus on their own survival rather than that of the government. This is a tipping point, when party discipline is replaced by sauve qui peut.
The most ferocious attacks on Mr Brown’s government are now being made by Labour MPs. Since 1997, the Tories have been rather pathetic at summoning raw anger but this scarcely matters when you have John McDonnell (Labour, Hayes and Harlington) to pick up the mace in parliament and wave it the faces of ministers. It was a purple-faced Andrew MacKinlay who last week declared that he would ‘never again’ trust the government. So the most brutal Tory strategy is to vote with Mr Brown on issues where his majority is threatened, stand well back and watch these Labour rebels tear the government apart.
Although Mr MacKinlay is ranked 125th in the list of Tory target seats (well within range of Conservative capture, in other words) his real enemy does not sit in the House of Commons. His constituency, Thurrock in Essex, has become a prime BNP target and will be contested at the next election by Nick Griffin, the party’s leader. The BNP’s shock victory in a Sevenoaks council by-election was achieved by a straight defection of Labour voters. Should this trend be reinforced in the English local elections in June, it will send Labour into a justified panic about the collapse of its core vote.
In this way, 15 years worth of Conservative prayers could be answered. The party never made an inch of progress against the Blairites, who focused remorselessly on wooing and reassuring Middle England. With Labour now increasingly assuaging its union paymasters (whatever Lord Mandelson might wish to the contrary) and worrying about salvaging its electoral ‘base’, the centre ground will be there for the taking. The shock of the recession has naturally revived the Labour Left, vindicating (in their view) their long-held conviction that New Labour’s appeasement of the market was a pathway to calamity. Mr Brown’s concessions in this direction — his tax on the rich, the collapse of spending discipline — have only encouraged traditional Labour to believe that its hours has come round once again after the ‘aberration’ of the New Labour era.
This is why all putative leaders are tilting to the left. Mr Balls has sharpened his presentation and is campaigning as hard as decency allows. If the election result makes a one-term Tory government likely (especially as Mr Cameron will be left to perform the economic equivalent of emergency root canal surgery, with all the popularity that entails), Mr Ball’s chances are reasonable. If Labour’s collective survival instincts are at least half-intact, the distinctly untribal James Purnell will be a serious candidate — perhaps allying with Jon Cruddas, who has finally summoned an appetite for the job. Presuming, of course, that both keep their seats.
Nor should Ms Harman’s candidacy be ruled out. The three-to-one odds that bookmakers are offering on the Leader of the House as the next Labour leader are shorter than the seven-to-one offered on Margaret Thatcher in 1975 (a bet taken, incidentally, by a young Foreign Office civil servant named Matthew Parris). Ms Harman triumphed in the Deputy Leadership election in 2007 thanks to Labour’s obscure voting system, which counts second preference votes and thereby ensures that everyone gets what no one really wants. This makes a multi-candidate election thrillingly impossible to predict.
All this explains why so few ministers are paying attention in Cabinet meetings. Those in vulnerable seats are in survival mode. Those in safe seats are in leadership election mode, scouring each other’s speeches for hidden messages or campaign themes. No one is really in government mode. No one outside Downing Street, let along outside Westminster, is interested in Mr Brown’s putative global economic deal. There may well be 14 long months to go until the general election, but Labour’s next leadership contest is already well underway.
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