Memex 1.1

Extraordinary piece in today’s Financial Times about what it’s like inside the Downing Street bunker.

For Downing Street staff, the early morning e-mails from the prime minister can set the tone for the whole day. “People feel permanently under the cosh,” says one with experience of life in the Brown bunker. “It is not an efficient or happy place to work. Gordon’s working methods are chaotic and extremely demanding.”

When things are going badly, the atmosphere sours. Staff with bad news to break say they have developed a tactic to avoid a prime ministerial eruption. “If you go in and appear very angry yourself, the PM can be sympathetic,” says one. It is not just the backroom team who receive regular tongue-lashings. Ministers report being summoned in for a chat and leaving with their ears burning.

Mr Brown, according to his officials, has a particularly volatile relationship with staplers, on one occasion stapling his hand in a moment of rage. On other occasions they become missiles. These incidents suggest a prime minister living on the edge. Some aides fear there will be a “blow up” moment in front of a camera, exposing the prime minister they know in private to the world outside.

What’s amazing — if this account is accurate — is that Brown is maniacally obsessed with newspaper headlines. The article claims that he’s up at 4am, emailing staff about ways of countering the next day’s news. Thus,

The prime minister’s obsession with the daily news cycle demands that he comes up with initiatives at short notice. Hospitals have been called early in the morning to be informed Mr Brown would like to visit.

Whatever he announces may not be fully formed. Relevant ministers admit that even they know little of what Mr Brown intends to say, fuelling Labour MPs’ claims that he is putting tactics before long-term strategy.

Ministers report being woken at dawn by Mr Brown, urging them to get on the airwaves to address the story of the day. A stabbing in south London demands that Mr Brown convenes a “knife crime summit”. A fuel blockade requires an “oil summit”.

I’m genuinely astonished by this, mainly because I fell for the story that Brown, whatever his defects, was a long-term, strategic thinker. The FT portrays him instead as “a prime minister obsessed by the next day’s headlines, working hellish hours, prone to anger, micromanaging the detail of government and slow to take decisions”.

Today’s papers are full of absurdly feeble stories about the ‘crisis’ now afflicting the government. Nobody really knows anything — so there are lots of ‘analysis’ pieces which simply string together every factoid and unattributable quote that the hacks have managed to garner.

Yesterday, Martin Kettle wrote this:

So far, very few MPs have gone public about their lack of confidence in Brown. But, make no mistake, such views are now the norm among increasingly large numbers of consenting backbenchers in private. These backbenchers have finally been pummelled out of their comfort zone by the events of this spring. They now fear Labour cannot win the next general election under Brown’s leadership. They say and believe that he has to go. They do not believe either that Brown will change or that - even if he did - voters would any longer pay attention to it. The question that now consumes these MPs is not whether Gordon Brown will step down - but how and when…

What this conveniently overlooks is that these are the same Labour MPs who lacked the bottle to challenge Brown’s appropriation of the leadership less than 12 months ago. In that sense they’re all complicit in the unfolding disaster. Although Martin Kettle still thinks it unlikely, it’s possible that they will eventually find the nerve to unhorse Brown. But that won’t make any difference. The game’s over. The electorate is bored with them. And besides the British system only works by alternating power between elected dictatorships.

Footnote: Puzzled by the Homburg reference? See here. And, while we’re on the subject, it’s interesting that in his memoirs Lord Levy, Tony Blair’s bagman, quotes Blair as telling him that Brown lacked the political qualities needed to defeat David Cameron.

Next Thursday sees the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, which just might turn out to be one of those pivotal by-elections. Andrew Rawnsley has some sharp comments about the nature and tone of the Labour campaign up there.

What was once regarded as the cleverest electioneering operation in the democratic world has descended into a crude parody of the silliest and nastiest aspects of political campaigning. Labour activists dressed in toppers and tails stalk the Tory candidate to attack him as a ‘toff’ because his family built up a successful chain of shoe repairers. It’s not Edward Timpson who is made to look like the nob by these puerile games.

When not playing the class card in a juvenile way, Labour has been playing the race card in a poisonous way. The BNP is not standing in the seat, but you could be forgiven for thinking that you were looking at their stuff when you read some of Labour’s campaign material. One Labour leaflet invites a vote against the Tories on the grounds that they ‘oppose making foreign nationals carry an ID card’. The Tories actually oppose making anyone carry an ID card. Labour should be ashamed of stooping to xenophobia to try to cling on to the seat. They are getting this down and dirty because so much is at stake here, especially for the Prime Minister…

Remember when Al Gore invented the Internet? (Well, actually I suspect that that story may have been an embroidered urban myth.) But here’s a report of a claim by Gordon Brown that a Brit invented the iPod.

While talking about the economy during daytime television show, This Morning, Brown let it drop that it was a Briton who in fact invented the iPod.

“Companies will come and locate in Britain if we have the talented people to offer them,” said Brown. “People with ideas and innovative things that they can market. You know it was a Brit that invented the iPod. If you’ve got really innovative things, people will come to your country to locate.”

Perhaps Brown was confused about the role of design engineer, Jonathan Ive, a Brit who crafted the casing and packaging of the iPod and many other Apple products. We dare say there’s a subtle difference between the house painter and architect. (Let’s also ignore that Brown’s one example of British ingenuity came from an American company, and that mp3 player sales aren’t exactly keeping the US economy primed at the moment.) And even then, Ive ran off to America for a job at Apple in 1992 and currently lives in California.

The Register maintains that the iPod was invented by Tony Fadell, who hails from Michigan!

Good column by Martin Kettle…

The problem is that Brown is Brown. There is not some other Brown. As he made clear to Andrew Marr last weekend, the prime minister sees the May 1 election reverse as a reprimand, not a rejection. His response is to work harder, like Boxer in Animal Farm. But working harder does not mean working differently, as the clumsy handling of Scotland this week showed.

Brown is set in his ways. His ways are tactical, triangulatory and increasingly old-fashioned. He remains fixated on the Daily Mail. His response to Frank Field’s campaign about the effects of his tax changes on the poor was classic old politics: first he vehemently denied it; then he sent out his nasties to try to take his critics down; then, I am told, he tried to buy Field off - twice - with a government job. Only when that failed did he then concede, extremely grudgingly, that he had got anything wrong.

These were not the responses of a man who understands change. His preposterous 20-hour days - the Sarah Brown profile in the June issue of Vogue reveals that he is often still working at 4am - will become 22-hour days and at some point, he believes, the voters will realise that he is right. To put it at its gentlest, this is what Joan Didion calls magical thinking.

The flipside of the denial about Brown is the continuing denial that anyone other than Brown is papabile. This is the kind of doubt that takes root during long incumbencies of any kind. But the imperative of events invariably dispels it. Political parties always have other potential leaders in the ranks. Labour today has several of them…

Andrew Rawnsley reflects on the findings of a 5000-sample poll published in today’s Observer.

What will especially frighten his advisers is the utter failure of the attempt to mount a fightback since the May Day massacre. In the wake of Labour’s slaughter in the local elections, the Prime Minister has toured TV’s soft sofas in an bid to claw back some public affection. Attempting to do human, he has told voters that he ‘feels your pain’. The public are not responding with empathy for his plight, but with an even bigger urge to inflict pain on their Prime Minister. His personal ratings have actually turned for the worse since he attempted the relaunch of his premiership.

It is not just the depth of this collapse that is stunning. It is the sheer width of it, the comprehensive shattering of his reputation in all the areas that matter to the public. On every leadership quality that is important, the Prime Minister is now regarded less favourably than David Cameron. Even when Jim Callaghan’s Labour government was in terminal decay, his personal ratings were still higher than those of Margaret Thatcher. Mr Brown, a figure who has been dominant in British government for more than a decade, is now seen as less fit to be Prime Minister than his Tory rival, a man whose only job in government has been as a bag carrier to Norman Lamont…

Maybe, says the Economist.

Can Mr Brown reverse the dynamics? He has been offered no shortage of advice from his party. Turn left, say those who never much cared for the New in New Labour, and in his weakness see a chance to ditch it. Smile more, say others—though when Mr Brown tries to speak human he seems less convincing than when he sticks to macroeconomics. There are a few who, despite the risk of looking chaotically undemocratic, simply enjoin him to go: over half the Labour supporters in a Populus poll for the Times want him out.

Mr Brown can scarcely complain about disloyalty, for he helped to inculcate a taste for plots and mutinies during his long march to Downing Street. But would his removal improve things? From the Labour Party’s point of view, there are too many flimsy contenders to replace him and scarcely any serious ones. The struggle to get rid of a leader causes lasting damage—as the Tories, who only recently recovered from the civil war unleashed by the ouster of Lady Thatcher, know well. Besides, the Tories need a huge swing to form a government at the next election, probably in 2010. They are still planning for a hung parliament. Scandal, or an eruption of atavistic, Conservatism may yet weaken Mr Cameron. The new mayor of London, Boris Johnson, now an icon of Tory resurgence, may embarrass his party.

Yep. He’s London’s new Mayor. And all the while he thought he was running for the Wine-Tasting Committee of the Drones Club. Much public entertainment lies ahead.

Bad news for the Supreme Leader, though. The game’s over. And it doesn’t have all that much to do with Gordon Brown’s competence/incompetence. It’s simply that Labour’s time is up. Three reasons for this:

Way back in December 2005 I wrote this:

Whenever someone intelligent seems to be behaving oddly, the hypothesis has to be that they know what they’re doing and that you simply haven’t figured it out. (Sometimes clever people do barmy things, but that’s not the best initial bet.)

So it is with Tony Blair and the Succession. If — as is widely believed — there is some kind of deal between him and Gordon Brown that the latter is the anointed successor, then Blair’s declared intention of serving “a full term” as Prime Minister seems bizarre. If he really wanted Brown to succeed and have a fighting chance of winning the next election, then there must be an orderly transition fairly soon (and certainly no more than 18 months from now). But this is not how Blair — steaming fanatically ahead with his reform-or-bust agenda — is behaving. Why?

Watching Brown in action this week as Adair Turner’s sensible report on the pensions crisis was published, an obvious thought occurred to me (I’m slow on the uptake, alas). It’s this: Blair doesn’t want Brown to succeed him, and he’s going to do everything in his power to stop him becoming leader!

What’s more, he’s right. If Labour goes into the next election with Brown facing David Cameron as the Tory leader, then they will lose.

Since then various people have pooh-poohed this analysis as the purest fantasy. So it’s really interesting to find this story in this morning’s Observer.

Gordon Brown’s leadership was in turmoil last night after claims that Tony Blair does not believe he is capable of beating David Cameron and winning the next election.

The humiliating charge from Blair’s former fundraiser and confidant Lord Levy came as Labour MPs pleaded for Brown to stay away from the campaign trail in this week’s critical London mayoral elections for fear of wrecking Ken Livingstone’s chances. Levy’s intervention will confirm fears that Brown is becoming an electoral liability.

Even though Blair last night issued a statement categorically denying the claims and insisting he did believe Labour could win under his successor, there was consternation in Downing Street.

In his memoirs, serialised today in the Mail on Sunday newspaper, Levy writes that Blair ‘told me on a number of occasions he was convinced Gordon “could never beat Cameron”‘.

I can’t claim any special insight for my original analysis. Just common sense.

Well, his sidekicks are — on his behalf. See his Twitter channel. As of this moment, he’s got 1,332 followers.

Thanks to Michael (who has some other interesting Twitter-channel links too) for spotting it.