Brown must dispel any notions he is presiding over a new phase of Blairism

HAD he called a snap general election this week and lost the key marginal constituencies in Britain in November, Gordon Brown could have destroyed his premiership.

Given how long he waited in the wings for the departure of Tony Blair, Brown’s premature departure from Downing Street would have been startling and ironic.

In doing nothing to dampen speculation about his intentions, he has, of course, only himself to blame for all the negative media coverage earlier this week.

Brown said he accepted responsibility for allowing the speculation to build, while insisting that he would have resisted an election even if opinion polls had pointed to a 100-seat majority for Labour. He reverted to careful spin about the real reasons for not calling an election by insisting, “It is not enough to express a vision, we have to show we are delivering on it.”

The idea that he would not have run if the polls were pointing to a landslide, and a much bigger majority than Blair enjoyed in his last election, is not plausible.

Ultimately, the New Labour project is about winning as many elections as possible — and it always has been, which is why, in 2005, despite their very public loathing of each other in the run-up to the general election of that year, he and Blair were joined at the hip for the launch of Labour’s campaign, with the economy centre-stage.

The front page of The Sun newspaper on Monday was closer to the truth in announcing, “He’s in the Brown stuff.”

It is ironic that for all Labour’s careful attention to spin and press coverage, Brown allowed the election speculation to backfire so badly, and was seen to wobble so obviously.

It’s also a reminder of how quickly a political leader can go from being seen as decisive and authoritative to being seen as a “bottler”, and how one like Conservative Party leader David Cameron can be transformed from being a lightweight, ineffective political presence to a dignified and perhaps even formidable leader in waiting.

Brown now needs to convince middle England that he can satisfy them better than Cameron.

Any prime minister is going to want a personal mandate, and it is understandable that Brown wants to decisively bury the Blair years.

But, ironically, the past fortnight has brought to mind some of the worst aspects of the Blair machine — the spinning, scheming and sense of disingenuousness that can make observers very cynical about politics.

Tactically, by mentioning time frames for the next election, Brown has also been seen to back himself into a corner with regard to his options for an election date, something that will encourage more speculation about when he might be willing to go to the country, though any number of events in the next year might get him off that hook.

Maybe it is just as well that all this occurred in his initial months as prime minister.

Maybe it will remind him that he needs to get back to business, take his eye off the opinion polls and deliver on his promises — because being in power remains the one big advantage he has over Cameron, whose drip-dripping of new policy initiatives will become less effective if they have to be dripped over two years.

Brown needs to take the next two years to make it appear that identifying Britain’s problems and empathising with them is what gives him his political conviction, as he outlined quite effectively at his recent party conference, instead of creating the impression that this is all a veneer, and that politics in Downing Street is still about key decisions being taken by a kitchen cabinet of pliant henchmen obsessed with tabloid headlines.

Brown needs to get back to where he was a few short months ago: proving he can oversee a young, hungry and hard-working government without having to be seen constantly, and without having to act like he is addicted to the microphone and the headlines, as Tony Blair was.

As a predecessor of his, Clement Attlee, once said, “If you have a good dog, don’t bark yourself.” A contemporary observer of Attlee’s noticed that, in studiously avoiding the charisma game, he rarely “used one syllable where none would do”.

Brown should follow suit; one of the advantages he has enjoyed in the past few months is the notion that he is enigmatic, understated, quietly intelligent and firm yet low-key, the kind of traits that mark him out as completely different to Blair.

The danger to him in allowing his administration to be bedeviled by the kind of circus witnessed over the past few weeks is that he will be seen as presiding over a new phase of Blairism. In appearing dignified and calm, the memory of the tempers, tantrums, sulks and lies that went to the heart of the Blair/Brown relationship could become a distant, and irrelevant, memory.

It is particularly important that Brown dispels with any such impression of continuity with the Blair years given that there was a strong sense during the last phase of Blair’s leadership that Brown was the man to be backed by Labour because he would “ride to the rescue” of a party Blair had presided over for too long. And if there are any more plans to invite Maggie Thatcher for tea parties at Downing Street, they should be scrapped.

As well as setting his own agenda, Brown needs to deliver on what Blair failed to, by ensuring a tangible improvement in public services — and take forward the idea of open and pluralist politics and that, in combining economic prosperity with social justice, fairness is still his first priority.

New frontiers in childcare, early learning, care of the elderly and more British children lifted out of poverty — all of which were part of the Labour manifesto in April 2005 — need to be prioritised.

BROWN also needs to get British troops home from Iraq without grandstanding and, given that George Bush will be gone from office in the US in little more than a year, he can plan a reorientation in foreign policy, particularly in an area that has troubled British governments and annoyed their western European colleagues for more than 50 years now — Britain’s relationship with the EU, an area in which more leadership was also promised in 2005.

Most importantly, in his time in office, Brown needs to prove he remains serious about something that was promised in 1997, when he boasted that what happened then, when the New Labour project began, would, in time, be seen as important as what happened to British politics in 1945, when the post-war Labour party began the welfare state and the drive for equality.

In Brown’s own words, what was promised in 1997 was a government and a style of politics that would be seen as “not monolithic, top-down or impersonal, but personal to all”. He needs to give that plenty of thought if he is not to repeat the mistakes of the Blair years, which resulted in great expectations giving way to disaffection and cynicism.