The sense of an ending

‘Sleaze has been the dominant factor throughout,’ declared the opposition, ‘and sleaze has been the end issue. Nothing better encapsulates what people think of this government. Sleaze will be one of the things that brings this government down.’ The opposition in question was New Labour and the government was Conservative. A decade on, with poetic symmetry, the positions are reversed: it is the supposedly irreproachable Gordon Brown who presides over a party mired in allegations of evasion, lies and outright criminality.

In his memoirs, John Major correctly identifies the lethal quality of the word ‘sleaze’: ‘it fed the public belief that the Conservative party as an institution had been in power too long, and had got into bad habits. As the mood music to the final act, sleaze chimed with the times.’ Substitute ‘New Labour’ for ‘Conservative’ and Major’s observation captures perfectly the predicament in which the Brown government now finds itself.