Gordon brown

Andrew Turnbull, who was permanent secretary at the Treasury from 1998 to 2002 and Cabinet Secretary from 2003 to 2005, has previous when it comes to criticising Gordon Brown. But his recent piece in the FT — ‘Six steps to salvage the Treasury’ — is one long barely coded attack on the PM. Take this line: “First and perhaps foremost, it [the Treasury] needs a strong ministerial team – a chancellor who wants to be chancellor for the full term rather than coveting the prime minister’s job.” Interestingly, Turnbull comes out in favour of the Tories’ plans to create an Office of Budgetary Responsibility. I know this is derided by

Alastair Campbell is before the Iraq Inquiry. As one of Blair’s closest aides, Campbell’s role in the run-up to the Iraq war was key. But I suspect the spinner-in-chief will be doing what he was originally hired to do: namely, protect his master by attracting the incoming fire. In this case, though, he will be helping Gordon Brown, not Tony Blair.   Because it is Brown’s role in the Iraq War, not that of Blair, that is the most obscure part of Britain’s modern history. As chancellor, Brown was the second most powerful man in government. He held the purse strings. If he had opposed the Iraq War, it is hard

The road to Damascus has nothing on this.  Ed Balls – in interview with the FT – has condemned the class war strategy, called for an end to Labour figures briefing against each other, and suggested that the government should be more “upfront” about spending cuts.  Hallelujah!  What a difference an attempted coup makes!  And so on and so on. But wait a minute.  What does the Schools Secretary actually say?  Worth looking at, that – because Balls hasn’t so much changed his arguments as changed the way he makes them.  Take, for instance, what he says about class war: “‘I’m totally against a class war strategy,’ he says. But

Divide and conquer, that is what preoccupies the Prime Minister. Later today, Gordon Brown will address the Parliamentary Labour Party to reassure them of the strength of his leadership and to invigorate the party by setting it on an election footing. How he achieves the former is anyone’s guess but he will realise the latter by investing Labour’s three election supremos: Mandelson, Harman and Douglas Alexander. In typical Brown style, these lieutenants’ roles are deliberately ill-defined. Who has ultimate authority? Who will be the attack dog? What is the difference between day to day running and managing an overall strategy? And which takes precedence? A pastmaster at internal intrigue, Brown

There’s that prism I mentioned: Ed Miliband writes an article for the Observer, which ostensibly backs Gordon Brown in the first paragraph, and it’s written up as the first, tentative step on his own leadership campaign.  Thing is, that’s probably also true.  The clue is in how far he steps off his ministerial beat*, to deliver an overall prospectus for the Labour Party: “Let’s start, as our manifesto will, with what the country needs in the coming five years. It can’t be about business as usual. We need to rebuild our economy in a different way from the past, with more jobs in real engineering not just financial engineering. This

So, at the end of a hyperactive week in politics, we’ve got a pair of interviews with Brown and Cameron.  The PM chats with the News of the World, while Cameron appeared on the Marr sofa earlier. One general similarity between the two interviews stands out: neither is particularly confrontational. Rather than chiding Labour after Alistair Darling’s admission yesterday, Cameron adopted a more conciliatory tone, saying things like: “If [the government] … set out reductions that we think make sense we won’t play politics with it, we’ll say yes.”  And, for his part, Brown only nods towards the “big choice” to be made at this year’s election, and doesn’t mention