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COMMENT: Gordon Brown: My (Small) Part in his Downfall

by James Wright.

No, I’m not behind the Northern Rock crisis. No, I’m not the cause of current global economic uncertainty. And no, despite the receding hairline, I’m not Peter Hain. But here, for the first time, I outline my part in Gordon Brown’s downfall.

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister after ten long years of Tony Blair, the political mood of the country changed palpably. Tony Blair, the Arch-Dissembler, had been replaced by the dependable son of a preacher-man, a man of principle and integrity.

Suddenly and surprisingly, all our fears about Gordon, the dour Scottish tax-grabber, becoming Prime Minister disappeared – it turned out he was a ‘pretty straight kind of guy’ whose sobriety and purposefulness contrasted greatly and favourably with the deceitfulness of his predecessor and the flippancy of his potential successor as Prime Minister in the Conservative Party.

Indeed, ‘Super-Gordon’ not only survived biblical floods, plagues and terrorist attacks, the first crucial tests of his premiership, but his statesman-like responses to these crises ensured that he actually prospered by them, at least in terms of the opinion polls.

It was during this time that I received a telephone call from a pollster (working on behalf of YouGov) who asked me in dulcet tones about my voting intentions in the event of a snap-election being called in October. I paused.

Quietly but unhesitatingly I said that I would be voting for Gordon Brown. I was then asked a series of questions about Gordon Brown’s characteristics. At this stage he was neither Stalin nor Mr. Bean but a solid, if underwhelming, House of Commons performer: a ‘conviction politician’ and, of course, statesman-like. And, as I recall, I said as much.

I can only plead guilty on the grounds of temporary insanity; I was soon cured after George Osbourne proposed to raise the threshold for inheritance tax (at last – a tax cut!) and David Cameron allegedly made the ‘speech of his life’ but, then again, not really because of anything the Conservatives did.

It was only after the Conservative Party Conference that I realised I had been deceived, or rather allowed myself to be deceived, as the real Gordon Brown emerged – a timid, over-cautious man, who called off, as Cameron himself obligingly pointed out, an election that he was almost certainly going to win.

At that moment, for me – a disillusioned Tory enamoured of Brown’s professed love of Britain and Britishness, and who had been delighted by the pictures of Margaret Thatcher’s return to Downing Street for tea, at the invitation of the Prime Minister – Gordon Brown’s political career started to make sense. He was not the antidote to Tony Blair at all. Tony Blair had always been portrayed (rightly, in my view) as a man of no principle. Gordon Brown, on the other hand, had principles and although I didn’t necessarily like them, at least he had some. Or so I used to think.

But just as Blair fluffed nearly all of his legacy-defining tests so too will Gordon Brown (and on Europe, he already has). His Blairite rhetoric about the constant ‘need for change’ and the importance of making ‘hard choices’ is in the end no substitute for principled, resolute action.

Furthermore, I came to realise – albeit belatedly – that Brown lacks political courage; if he didn’t he would have been Prime Minister years ago. Brown, it is worth restating, was as much the architect of the vacuous New Labour Project as Tony Blair: it was merely convenient for Blair the moderniser and Brown the king-in-waiting, to portray the latter as a ‘real’ Labour man in order to carry with them both the ‘awkward squad’ in the parliamentary party.

I had misinterpreted Brown’s remarkable silence over the issues which were most dear to Blair’s heart as conscientious objection. Of course, I was wrong – it was quite literally a party trick. This isn’t to say that Blair and Brown were happy bedfellows, but their differences were – and are – more personal than political.

The current Prime Minister’s lack of principles and the reasons for the aimlessness and drift of the government at the moment (themselves causally and mutually linked) should really have been obvious to me and the rest of the country during his time at the Treasury.

Then, in the New Year, still coming to terms with Brown’s great deception, I was called again by the same polling organisation and asked about my voting intentions, this time for an election which will no doubt come in 2009 or 2010. Holding my nose, I said that I would now be voting Conservative (I am no lover of Dave). My brief – and purely political – affair with Gordon Brown was over.

On its own, my change of heart is hardly worth mentioning, but I take some comfort from the fact that I am part of a wider trend of reformed sinners and dupes that has emerged against Gordon Brown in recent weeks. The opinion poll which I participated in gave the Conservatives a lead of several points over Labour. If repeated in a general election, Labour would, according to all opinion polls at the moment, almost certainly lose power outright.

And, inasmuch as all votes count (though some more than others in Britain), that would be no small part for me to play in the ultimate downfall of Gordon Brown. Not least since I could never contemplate voting for him again, now that I – and we all – know the truth.

James Wright is a History student from Christ Church.

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