Whenever politicians start talking about their ‘vision’ for the country, it is time to start counting the spoons. I remember thinking that when Gordon Brown bottled out of calling an election in the first Autumn of his premiership and went on TV saying that he just wanted time to spell out his ‘vision’ for Britain. I was surprised at the time that so many commentators were willing to take him at face value. But it seems that even the Guardian has finally had enough. Here’s its Leader today:

The truth is that there is no vision from him, no plan, no argument for the future and no support. The public see it. His party sees it. The cabinet must see it too, although they are not yet bold enough to say so. The prime minister demands loyalty, but that has become too much to ask of a party, and a country, that was never given the chance to vote for him. Had there been a contest for the leadership in 2007 – and had Mr Brown called a general election – he would probably have won. He decided not to do these things. And he has largely failed since.

I always thought Brown would make a terrible Prime Minister. He’s secretive, indecisive, obsessive and a control freak. That combination might work in the Treasury. But it would never have worked in Number Ten. And I always had the feeling that Tony Blair had similar thoughts about Brown’s suitability for the highest office — hence my original Homburg Factor post of long ago. Which leads to another thought. Remember the famous ‘Granola Deal’ in which Brown and Blair allegedly decided that Blair would run for the leadership following the death of John Smith? New Labour’s great stroke of luck was that Blair became Leader. If it had been Brown, Labour would have won the 1997 election — for the simple reason that a “dog with a mallet up its arse” (to use a colourful Irish phrase) would have beaten the Tories in 1997 (just as a similarly-equipped mongrel will beat Labour in 2010). But I doubt that Labour would have won a second term with Brown in charge.

For a control freak, the disintegration of his government must be a galling experience. But I’ll be very surprised if he goes voluntarily. Meanwhile, his MPs have nobody to blame but themselves. They, after all, lacked the cojones to have a leadership election after Blair stepped down.

And Enoch Powell was right: all political careers end in failure.

The Economist thinks that it was a dishonest, politicking effort. It’s hard to disagree.

The wheel of fortune turns swiftly in politics. Gordon Brown pulled off the G20 meeting in London on April 2nd, emerging with a plausible aura of global statesmanship. After a handful of Labour sleaze stories and a misguided statement on YouTube, the prime minister looked more like Richard Nixon: shifty, angry and with a list of enemies to smear. And that was before a downright dishonest budget on April 22nd.

The budget was a crucial one, for two reasons. First, Mr Brown is running out of time—he has to hold an election by June 2010—and Britain seems increasingly fed up with him. The public regards his party with distaste (see article). That’s partly because a dozen years in power tends to tarnish: when the home secretary’s husband charges the taxpayer for the porn he watches, one gets an inkling that a government’s time is up. But it’s also because of Mr Brown’s character. His strength, which the G20 meeting displayed, is dour pragmatism. Too often, though, he resorts to tribal politics, in a way that seems both scheming and incompetent.

Second, the budget marks the government’s attempts to deal with the fiscal consequences of the worst slowdown since the second world war. Mr Brown is partly to blame for this mess, but crisis management should have played to his strengths; instead, it revealed his worst side…

I’ve always thought that the key factor has little or nothing to do with politics. The British electorate isn’t much interested in politics, but when a regime has been in power for a while the public simply gets bored with it. And when that happens, the game is up.

Tony Blair always thought that Brown would be a disaster as Prime Minister (see The Homburg Factor), and in that at least he turns out to have been right. I’ve never met Brown, but he’s always seemed fishy. What’s especially creepy is all that sanctimonious crap about being “a son of the Manse”, as if somehow that elevated him onto a higher moral plane than the rest of us — not to mention the rest of the political class. The Damien McBride episode exposed this moralistic posturing for what it was — hypocritical baloney. McBride has been close to Brown for years. Everyone who ever came into contact with McB knew what he was like. Brown not only knew, but obviously approved — otherwise why would he have kept him on (and brought him with him to Number Ten)?

The ubiquitous commentator Will Hutton has done a two-part TV documentary for Dispatches on how the financial crisis happened. The first part was screened last night, and although it’s clear that Hutton is riding his own hobby-horse (i.e. the view that the British government and regulators proved deeply incompetent when it came to the crunch), his film did include three toe-curling video clips.

The first shows Brown, newly-installed as Chancellor, explaining smugly to the House of Commons how his shiny new tripartite system for ‘light’ regulation of the banking system was a world beater — while, behind him, Tony Blair smirks complacently on the government front bench. The second clip shows Brown giving his first speech to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet and sucking up in a nauseating way to the assembled members of the City elite. The final clip shows him opening the London office of Lehman Brothers: he unveils a plaque and then begins fawning on Richard Fuld, CEO of the bank and arguably the creepiest-looking dude since Boris Karloff hung up his mask. What these clips illustrate above all is the extent to which Brown was in awe of the soi-disant ‘masters of the universe’. They should be on a permanent loop. Perhaps they already are — on YouTube.

I’ve just caught up with David Miliband’s article, which is refreshing because it’s about ideas rather than the brain-dead media obsession with Brown’s personality. I liked this passage:

With hindsight, we should have got on with reforming the NHS sooner. We needed better planning for how to win the peace in Iraq, not just win the war. We should have devolved more power away from Whitehall and Westminster. We needed a clearer drive towards becoming a low-carbon, energy-efficient economy, not just to tackle climate change but to cut energy bills.

But 10 years of rising prosperity, a health service brought back from the brink, and social norms around women’s and minority rights transformed, have not come about by accident. After all, the Tories opposed almost all the measures that have made a difference — from the windfall tax on privatised utilities to family-friendly working.

Now what are they offering? The Tories say society is broken. By what measure? Rising crime? No, crime has fallen more in the past 10 years than at any time in the past century. Knife crime and gun crime are serious problems. But since targeting the spike in gun crime, it has been cut by 13% in a year, and we have to do the same with knife crime.

What about the social breakdown that causes crime? More single parents dependent on the state? No, employment has risen sharply for lone parents because the state has funded childcare and made work pay. Falling school standards? No, they are rising. More asylum seekers? No, we said we would reform the system and slash the numbers, and we did…

That’s a start. It’s nice to see a Labour bigwig express some regrets. But he doesn’t go far enough. No serious mention of the decision to go to war in Iraq, for example (just regret that there wasn’t more planning for the aftermath). No appreciation of the fundamental weaknesses of Labour’s approach to the public services — in particular its crazed obsession with ‘targets’. And then there’s the government’s innate authoritarianism, its insistence on detention without charge or trial, its determination to have an ID card system and its relentless extension of the powers of surveillance. Miliband’s willingness to admit to weakness and maybe even of error is a welcome change, but it looks like pretty feeble stuff to me.

Now if there were to be a putsch that unhorsed Brown, and if the new leader were really to make a clean break with the past in relation to the above list, then it would pull the rug from under the Cameroonians, and might even cause the electorate to rub its collective eyes in amazement — and interest. But I can’t see it happening.

Sunder Katwala (Secretary of the Fabian Society) has some critical comments on the Miliband article.

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.