Brown’s great clunking fist holds a lesson in power-play for Cowen

It has enabled him to confound (low) expectations, appearing more relaxed but also more nimble, unleashing a series of populist surprises upon his party and his opponents

I WAS at the British Labour Party’s annual conference in Bournemouth last week when the only question on delegates’ lips was: “will he or won’t he?”

Now that the Blairites have fallen into line, the only topic of conversation was the prospects for a general election in November. Has Gordon Brown got the nerve to risk all on a snap poll?

For once, the implications for Ireland are not significant: the North will return almost exactly the same configuration of MPs as it did in 2005. The outstanding matters to conclude in the peace process are few and far between. Any difference of approach between a Labour or Tory government is merely presentational.

One man who will be watching developments keenly, though, will be Tánaiste Brian Cowen. Having come to power within weeks of each other in 1997, Labour’s and Fianna Fáil’s has been an extraordinarily successful partnership, not least on the Northern question. Ministers on both sides know each other well.

With little fanfare, the Government has eagerly picked up some of Whitehall’s better ideas and adapted them to Irish circumstances. Meanwhile, New Labour’s flag-waving doesn’t ruffle feathers in Dublin because it is always made abundantly clear that when Gordon Brown talks endlessly about Britishness, his definition doesn’t cross the Irish Sea to Belfast.

So will Brown take advantage of his unexpected opinion poll lead and boldly seek a personal mandate? Would Cowen do the same if Bertie Ahern, like Tony Blair, were unable, for whatever reason, to fulfil his promise to serve “a full third term”?

Would a fourth term for Labour be spoilt by the same petty corruption and policy drift as the Tories’ fourth term under John Major?

Fianna Fáil is, of course, still fresh from a recent victory more satisfying than many of their TDs dared hope. But Cowen knows there is no harder task for political parties than to renew themselves in office. Electorates inevitably grow weary of seeing the same faces on TV every night. Governments are easy targets for charges of hypocrisy as policies change to adapt to changed circumstances.

Delegates at both the Labour and Tory conferences have had to pinch themselves: what a difference a year makes. A year ago, Blair loyalists were giving interviews to the effect that the dour Presbyterian chancellor from Kirkcaldy was not just psychologically flawed but woefully out of touch with the aspirations of the British people, 85% of whom are English. Having failed to find a “Stop Gordon” candidate, they dreaded going into an early election with a leader they feared would be an albatross around their necks.

Even unaligned Labour MPs were gloomily resigned to a Brown premiership because the alternative was a split party. Blair might be a distant memory, but he did teach them one thing: losing elections wasn’t one of Labour’s finer traditions.

The turnaround in the main parties’ fortunes has been swift. As recently as the start of the summer, Labour was agonising over the loss of 900 council seats in England and the victory of the SNP on Brown’s doorstep. The challenges seemed formidable: Iraq, the rise of English nationalism, the demands for an EU referendum, the “broken society”, the Islamist threat, persistent youth unemployment and an equally stubborn 5.5 million people on out-of-work benefits. All these problems weighed heavily on the shoulders of British progressives.

The Tories, naturally, saw the situation as ripe with opportunities. They had led in the polls ever since they chose fresh-faced David Cameron as their leader and begun the tricky task of “decontaminating” the Conservative brand by taking the fight to policy areas normally regarded as Labour’s prerogative.

But the fact is the Tories badly underestimated the new prime minister and the force of his “great clunking fist”. Later today we will know if David Cameron has been able to raise his game sufficiently to deter Brown from going to the country a full two-and-a-half years before he is obliged to do so.

In truth, the former chancellor’s depressed share price before he assumed the keys to No 10 was hugely to his advantage. It has enabled him to confound (low) expectations, appearing visibly more relaxed but also more nimble, unleashing a series of populist surprises upon his party and his opponents. Who in the spring would have imagined that Tory MPs and donors would still be defecting to Labour, not the other way around?

The Brownites’ success has been in dusting down several sides of their man’s character that appeal to right-leaning voters in Middle England. Take his control freakery. While irritating to certain cabinet colleagues, it was this trait that led him to prevent early entry into the eurozone. Tony Blair wittered on about the single currency being Britain’s “destiny”, but his power-hungry chancellor was keenly focused on the detail. To Brown, fuzzy talk of “improved integration with our European partners” just looked like fewer economic levers for him to pull.

Next, the “Stalinist tendencies” Brown is accused of harbouring. As it happens, a bit of Stalinist ruthlessness strikes a rather favourable contrast with the drift and poor record of delivery during the Blair years. As chancellor, Brown discovered, as Mrs Thatcher had done, that being brutal with civil servants is often the only way to get things done.

NOR is Brown inclined to tax the rich. As he himself points out, when Labour came to power, the wealthiest 10% in Britain contributed just 40% of the tax haul. Today, without raising the top income tax rate, it is 50%. He has learnt that the wealthy earn more and pay more if incentivised to work more and speculate more. Finally, those concerned about Britain’s position in the world can be confident that both main contenders for the US presidency, Clinton and Giuliani, as well as almost all European leaders, prefer Brown to Cameron.

Events have played into Brown’s hands as well. Terrorist attacks and the credit crunch have all driven nervous floating voters into the welcoming arms of the rather uninspiring but solid Scotsman. Presbyterians have many failings, but they don’t tend to flap in a crisis.

Your prime minister is on your side, Britain’s side, the side of aspiration and the traditional way of life, he tells his people. What would Cameron and his coterie, with their charmed existences, know about what it is to struggle?

It remains to be seen if Cameron’s privileged background will count against him in the English Midlands where an election will be won and lost. It’s probably more of a factor in the media than the suburbs. What Cameron does know, as Enda Kenny knows, is that all opposition leaders suffer the same handicap: those already in office have their fingers on the trigger of the starting gun.