Flash in the pan??
If you had a choice, who would you prefer to be? Your choices are….Steve McLaren or Gordon Brown. I suppose most would choose Brown on the grounds that at least he still has his job, at least for now. No amount of spin can conceal what a traumatic week it has been for the Prime Minister. What looked like a safe and steady pair of hands to guide the ship gently home after the rollercoaster ride of the Blair years have suddenly started to tremble and look o-so shaky.
9/10’s of politics is perception and it’s to hard to think peoples perception of the government can be good when every evening they sit down to digest their dinner along with the news of ‘yet another government crisis’ which seem to fill the evening news. The seeming exhaustion of the media’s patience with Labour is here a crucial factor; the media is not the sole determinant of opinions but they do hold sway over and do a lot to influence perceptions.
Brown’s image was carefully crafted to be almost managerial; devoid of ideas and charisma as a direct attempt to break from the highly ideological Blair era; an era discredited by Blair’s smoke-and-mirrors with ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – now you see them, now you don’t. This suited an ex-Chancellor who would be used to cultivating this image. After all, who wants their bank manager to be some slick crusading ideologue (like Blair was); Brown perfectly cultivated the image of stability in No11 and why shouldn’t that be brought across to No 10 (‘Not flash, just Gordon’)?
Here is the core of why the current batch of crises is hitting the government hard despite the fact that some of the events were beyond its’ immediate sphere of control. You live by the sword and die by the sword of your own choosing in politics; having sold himself and his government so, Brown now finds himself undone by the myopic management of Northern Rock and the bureaucratic buffoonery of Whitehall at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs department.
Brown’s decision not to call an early election looked bad but it’s something he could have got away with in isolation (opinion polls after all showed little public enthusiasm for a windswept trek to the local primary) but in retrospect it’s seen as the beginning of the malaise and is simply something else David Cameron can use to bash the government. In reality, his Conservative’s will be content enough to wait; although new opinion polls are putting them ahead of Labour it’s not by enough to give them a landslide or even a totally secure majority. They will be content to simply watch the House of Cards fold and reap the rewards; and fall it will.
Labour Party spin-doctors and apartchicks murmur in their sleep that it’s a marathon not a sprint but you look at the route of that marathon and all dew-eyed confidence falters. For example, what chance an ID card scheme now, much less one that enjoys popular support from people who won’t want their intimate details lost somewhere in the bowels of the ‘Peoples Post Office’. It won’t be liberals leading the marches against either; it will be David Cameron, who is not one to miss a political trick, making the liberals case for them. An extension of the detention limit for terror suspects is also unlikely to be passed now; all of which will further unsteady the government and reinforce the already established pattern of a blunderbuss skidding out of control.
If you add into the mix the hint of sleaze (that old faithful friend, party funding) then what it all adds up to is a disaster. Normally this would be a cause for celebration on the left/liberal, Guardian/Independent sympathising fringes but it is little cause for celebration for the reason cited above; that the main beneficiaries of this mess is not the progressive left but in actual fact the reactionary right. So, the question is where from here? How does the liberal left oppose the right while salvaging something from the wreckage of 10 years of Labour rule?
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