LONDON, 15 May 2005 — You’ll be sorry. All those of you who hate Tony Blair and think Gordon Brown should take over as prime minister “sooner rather than later” — which usually seems to mean in July 2004. I predict that, if Brown becomes prime minister, he will be greeted with euphoria, rejoicing and shameless sycophancy on a scale not seen since Blair became the prime minister eight years ago. I also predict that his honeymoon with the press and the public will last about five minutes.
I do not deny that the chancellor is more popular than the prime minister, and that his leading role in the election campaign helped Labour to win more convincingly than it would otherwise have done. But his popularity is a function of one thing to the exclusion of almost all else, which is that he is not Blair. People seem to read into Brown the opposite of anything and everything they do not like about the prime minister. Many, many people, therefore, are going to be disappointed when Blair has gone and Brown has to define himself in his own right. This ought not to be a controversial observation. Gordon Brown is, after all, the co-architect of New Labour. The only reason people might think that he would be different from Blair is because he, like Blair, is quite clever at political semaphore — the careful organization of signals that, without explicit words on the record, create the impression that he is what people want him to be.
Let us look at the reasons why people are looking forward to Brown’s succession. First and foremost is the Iraq war. Brown supported it publicly at the time, even if explicit authority from the UN could not be obtained. “If the international community asks for disarmament and that doesn’t happen, he [Saddam] cannot be let off the hook and we cannot leave him armed,” he said two months before the invasion. But he had refused to be drawn on it before then, and was content to be portrayed as semidetached from the decision. And his most striking intervention in the election campaign, to give a straight answer, “Yes”, to the question, “Would you have behaved in the same way in identical circumstances?”, was indulgently regarded by the anti-war party as an act of heroic party loyalty rather than as grounds for arraignment at The Hague.
What really matters is whether Brown would behave any differently from Blair in non-identical circumstances in the future. Here I have bad news for Brown’s anti-war supporters. The chancellor was well known for his admiration of America and his willingness to take on other members of the European Union long before these traits became unexpectedly associated with Blair.
More broadly, the idea that Brown as prime minister would usher in a nirvana of open and collegiate government is plainly unreal. There are those who thought that the “progressive consensus” of which Brown spoke in his conference speech last September might mean being nice to the Liberal Democrats and introducing proportional representation along with free milk and honey. No chance. Brown was hostile to Blair’s flirtation with Paddy Ashdown and has always been sullenly unenthusiastic about electoral reform.
The other big reason why those on the liberal left look forward to a Brown government is that they yearn not so much for bolder redistribution from rich to poor but more explicit redistribution. They want a Labour government that promotes equality and is proud of it. They are looking to the wrong man. Robert Peston, whose sympathetic biography of the dauphin appeared earlier this year, recounts a conversation with the chancellor in his car at the time of the 1999 Budget. “Why did you write that the budget would be ‘seriously redistributive’?” Brown demanded. Peston was surprised, and could have simply answered that it was true — the Budget abolished the married couples allowance in favor of the children’s tax credit, tilting the tax system in favor of the less well-off. Instead, Peston asked what the problem was. “It was profoundly unhelpful,” Brown said. “I’d like to know why you wrote it. Who talked to you?”
Memories are selective and short. It was Brown who was responsible for the cut in lone parent benefit in 1998. It was Brown who is associated with the concept of stealth taxes (although, as Blair dryly pointed out the other day, the trouble with most stealth taxes is that they are “actually pretty obvious”). If this government has been redistributive by stealth, Brown has been responsible for both the redistribution and the stealth. Then there are the trade unionists who think that Blair is too much in awe of big business, and who look approvingly on Brown as someone who speaks the language of the labor movement. They have been listening to the chancellor’s cadences rather than to the content of his rhetoric. Labor market flexibility is what he has been “on about” for 13 years, both as shadow chancellor and the real thing.
The problem with the hatred of Blair that uses Iraq as its focus is that it is not only about the war. It also seems to be an excuse for many on the left to avoid having to deal with the compromises required of power. If and when Brown takes over, those difficult compromises will have to be faced again. The New Labour idea will have to be refounded and those arguments won all over again. Brown is too shrewd an observer of his next-door neighbor not to realize that he will have to tack hard to the right the moment he takes over in order to put New Labour’s electoral coalition back together.
For that reason, it cannot be in Brown’s interest to take over too soon. The speed with which the media move on to the “next big thing” — which has yielded as Brown’s shadow the 33-year-old George Osborne — means that the backlash against Brown when people realize that he, too, is New Labour could be swift and vicious. For the sake of embedding New Labour as the natural party of government, and for Brown’s own sake, Blair will have to carry on, enduring the shocking disrespect that characterizes modern politics, for as long as he possibly can.
