For my money, it is not Tony Blair who has the trickiest speech to make to this year’s Labour conference. The person with most cause to bite his nails is Gordon Brown. Everyone expects him to be prime minister. He is the hottest favorite to move into No. 10 since Anthony Eden, a comparison which the chancellor understandably hates. That does not mean he will definitely become prime minister. Nothing is 100 percent guaranteed in politics. His old enemy, Peter Mandelson, sometimes mischievously reminds people that his grandfather, Herbert Morrison, was thought to be a dead cert to succeed Clement Attlee. But the Labour party decided to jump a generation and elected Hugh Gaitskell. This is a precedent that Gordon Brown will find even more loathsome.
What is certain is that he will rise before the conference on its first full day in the role of prime minister-designate. Many of those in Manchester will expect him to be in the real job by the time they meet at a conference again. Some will be arguing that only his immediate installation in No. 10 can give Labour a chance of recovering from its lowest poll ratings in 19 years. While this might all sound promising for Gordon Brown, it also burdens him with huge and conflicting expectations as it faces him with dilemmas that he’d much prefer to avoid.
There is a tempestuous annual ritual to Labour conferences. First, there is the Brown speech, then there is Blair’s. On the Monday, the Chancellor slaps down the gauntlet by staking his claim for a change of leadership. On the Tuesday, Tony Blair gets to his feet to make his case for the continuation of his premiership and sticks Gordon Brown back in his box.
The chancellor’s speech last year was so lightly coded that it did not require the skills of GCHQ to decipher his message. He offered to give Labour back its “moral compass” and dwelt heavily on the need to restore “trust”. He did not refer directly to Iraq or party funding. He did not need to. Everyone understood that he was arguing that only a change of premier could restore the trust that had been lost by Tony Blair. That speech so infuriated some of the prime minister’s aides that they suggested to their boss that he should have his revenge on the Chancellor by inserting a line into the text of his speech the next day saying that he had changed his mind and would be running for a fourth term after all. It would be worth it, they joked, just to see the look on the next-door neighbor’s face.
The prime minister-in-waiting-and-waiting told last year’s conference that he would be going on a 12-month national tour to discuss the “changes we need to build for the future”. This proclamation of a royal progress around his future kingdom was Gordon Brown’s attempt to put Tony Blair on a year’s notice to pack his bags. It implied an expectation that his rival would be gone from No. 10 by the time the chancellor had returned from his travels. I don’t know what happened to that Brown national tour. Like Bonnie Prince Charlie’s invasion of England, perhaps it got to Derby and then turned back.
Another year and Gordon Brown finds that Tony Blair is still stubbornly ensconced in No 10. Another year and Gordon Brown is still waiting to be prime minister, the role which he is so sick of rehearsing. He can hardly announce that he is copying the Rolling Stones and embarking on another national tour. Well, I suppose he could, but it would sound silly.
Some of his most zealous supporters are urging him finally to overcome his native caution and say out loud that it is time for Tony Blair to quit. The chancellor has previously shied away from such an act of regicide in terror of the consequences. He has been ready to wound, but unwilling to strike. He has not tried directly to dethrone Blair for fear that the bloodstained crown wouldn’t be worth inheriting. There is now agitation from his own camp to make a full-frontal challenge on the incumbent. Some of the chancellor’s allies argue that he cannot afford to waver any more. If he does not act soon, then it will be too late for him personally as well as for the government.
The prime minister has been heard to tell friends that it is time that Gordon Brown began to lay out what he would do in No. 10. Even if you agree with that, you have to remark on the hypocrisy of Blairites demanding a manifesto from the chancellor. When he does suggest how he might be different as prime minister, Gordon Brown is accused from the same quarter of over-reaching himself. “We cannot win,” sighs one of his friends.
That is why he has remained so silent during August even though it has meant watching John Reid build himself up. The chancellor did not want to be accused of trying to launch a coup while the prime minister was abroad. This week, Brown will be addressing the nation — the nation of Sweden. The prime minister returns to Britain and the chancellor is off to Scandinavia, as if the two of them cannot bear to be in the same country at the same time.
Faced with their worst poll ratings in nearly two decades, Labour MPs want to know whether an early change at the top would improve their prospects or make them even darker. The trades unions are eagerly anticipating Brown and drawing up shopping lists of what they want from him. So are many other clamorous interest groups, causes and factions. Both his party and the country are trying to imagine how a Prime Minister Brown might govern the country. Gordon Brown is the famous enigma. We know him extremely well as chancellor, but no one is at all certain how he would turn out as prime minister. His position is ambiguous. He is trying to project himself as both the figure of reassuring continuity and the man of revitalizing change.
In the past, he has used conferences to position himself to the left of the present occupant of No. 10. Sometimes quite subtly, on other occasions rather clumsily, the chancellor has led the Labour party to believe that things would be much more to its liking were he in No. 10 and not that ghastly Tory Blair. While the latter has often issued challenges to his party, the chancellor has used the conference platform to please (Blairites would say to pander to) the party.
Gordon Brown will have to decide who is his priority this year. The Chancellor has recently been trying to secure his right flank at the cost of angering some of his erstwhile admirers on the left. He declared himself for the renewal of the nuclear deterrent, let it be known he favors more draconian anti-terror legislation and joined those advocating a new generation of nuclear power stations.
The Labour left is confused and divided about what to make of Gordon Brown. You can hear some on the left argue that he is merely positioning to try to appease the Blairites and square the right-wing press. Just you wait, they say, until he gets to No. 10. Then you will see what a break he will be from Tony Blair.
Others on the left contend that he is another traitor to socialism who will be so similar to the man he would replace as to make no difference.
