EMAIL of the SPECIOUS

The Prime Minister appears wholly to have mislaid his hitherto well-attuned political instincts over the affair of the smear-mails. It has been an object lesson in how to make a bad situation much worse. The danger is that people like me who are naturally well-disposed towards Gordon Brown begin to suspect that he has lost his appetite for the fight as well as his tactical acumen. A kind of death wish seems to be settling over Downing Street, much as it did in the dog days of the Major, Callaghan and Macmillan/Douglas Home premierships.

When Brown delayed a much-demanded decision about an early election, David Cameron tried to tar him as a “ditherer”, for no better reason than that it worked for Blair against John Major – of course, it worked against Major because it was a well-landed punch. Now the opposition has a much better founded claim: that the PM is behaving like a loser.

The conventional wisdom, established now for more than eighteen months, is that the Tories will easily carry the next general election and David Cameron will be prime minister. JK Galbraith, who coined the term, noted inter alia that conventional wisdom “reserves its scorn for what it is likely to term a purely destructive or negative position”. And he went on: “In this, as so often, it manifests a sound instinct for self-preservation” [The Affluent Society 1958]. It’s hard to imagine anything more destructive or negative than the emailed falsehoods that Brown’s close associate Damian McBride proposed to circulate in the hope of undermining Cameron and his front bench (with the possible exception of those newspapers, led by Murdoch’s Sunday Times, that condemned the tactic while gleefully reproducing the gist of the smears).

The Tories’ outrage at this disclosure indeed manifests self-preservation. They have plenty of black propagandists of their own who could be unmasked in dastardly deeds. There but for the grace of political bloggers, Cameron will be muttering, goes my close team of advisors (one of whom, who bears the unlikely name of Stephen Gilbert, is obviously a wrong ’un).

Brown has made two obvious mistakes, one reactive the other systematic. The former was to let the opposition seize the initiative. As soon as McBride’s emails were in the public domain, the PM should have taken responsibility. It may stick in his craw as much as it would in mine to indulge the gesture politics of apologising, but it would have been obvious to the Number 10 advisors that those libelled in the emails would be demanding a full apology and that fair-minded people would perfectly well understand why they would do so. Brown ought to have had the nous to anticipate such a demand by pre-empting it, not painting himself into a corner wherein to apologise late looks weak and to continue to refuse to apologise looks churlish and ungracious. Brown doesn’t do gracious, even at the best of times. All the more important, then, that he avoid situations in which good grace is naturally called for.


Damian Omen 2 or McBride of Frankenstein?
pic courtesy of BBC News website

The broader mistake lies in both Brown’s and Tony Blair’s historic reliance on advisors who appear to have emerged from the mulm at the bottom of a particularly stagnant aquarium. Looking at Damian McBride, you feel that no one with any sense would trust him with the care of a boiled sweet, let alone far-reaching matters at the heart of government. Many of the others have been little better: Derek Draper, Charlie Whelan, Wilf Stevenson, Lord Levy, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser (this last also famous for ill-advised emails) – you would have thought giving any of them positions of trust was something of a gamble. It becomes increasingly clear that people like these have persistently briefed against the imagined rivals of Blair/Brown within the Labour Party quite as extensively as against the official opposition. Apologists for Blair and Brown argue – with no great conviction – that these attack dogs were not licensed by their masters and hence those masters should not be blamed for their dogs’ bad behaviour. As a dog owner, I know full well that any breach of law, peace or etiquette committed by a dog of mine is my own responsibility. This whole sorry/not sorry business does raise vexing questions about both Blair and Brown and their skill at reading character and at understanding what is appropriate.

In Gordon Brown’s case, another resonance comes into play. Not since Aneurin Bevan, who once described the Tory front bench as “scum”, has a senior Labour politician evinced such gut distaste for the party opposite. This tends to breed the suspicion that Brown will not desist from low tactics if they will do Mr Cameron a piece of no-good, even just for the hell of it. This is a perilous instinct. The British still have a finely tuned nose for fair play and recoil from politicians, however exulted, who appear to be stooping to try to conquer. Only a few days ago, the Prime Minister was justly basking in the glow of a good G20. If he has frittered away that good will in a gruesome and demeaning domestic disaster, he really has only himself to blame.