Brown, not out?

Today's front page

TODAY’S Sunday Times reports that Gordon Brown is planning to stay at the helm of the Labour Party – even if it is defeated in the General Election later this year.

Despite opinion poll ratings which do show some narrowing between Labour and the Conservatives, the safe money is still on a drubbing for Labour when the General Election finally comes. (Is it really just five years since we had the last one?)

The newspaper reports that sources are convinced that the Prime Minister does not think it is in Labour’s interests to stand aside if he is narrowly defeated in a few months’ time. Some quotes from the article add flavour:

“The Prime Minister has told close colleagues that he will refuse to quit unless the Conservatives win a significant majority.”

“‘He thinks that if the May election is indecisive and if there is any prospect of a second election, Labour should not be plunged immediately into a messy leadership contest.’”

“Brown’s Labour critics fear his decision to remain in post is part of a strategy to pave the way for his ally Ed Balls, the schools secretary, to succeed him as party leader. Allies of David Miliband, the foreign secretary and Balls’s main leadership rival, fear Brown will use his continued control of the Labour party machinery to boost the schools secretary’s chances of succeeding him.”

What struck me on reading this article was how it fits in to historical patterns. All leaders tend to emphasise they will stay beyond elections, regardless of outcomes, but not many are given the opportunity. You do badly, and you tend to go, don’t you? Certainly for nearly 40 years every Labour leader who lost an election decided to walk very quickly afterwards. Think Callaghan in 1979-80, Foot in 1983, and Kinnock in 1992. What made Kinnock different in 1987 was that Labour showed marked progress and improvement at that election, even if it did not come anywhere near clinching it. Even if a hung Parliament happens, Gordon Brown would still have taken Labour backwards in electoral terms by quite some way and with quite some pressure on the reverse gear.

In such circumstances, would his party both in Parliament and the country want him to stay on?

It is a rare leader who does what Rhodri Morgan did some months ago: choose the date of their departure some years before and actually stick to that plan. Neither Thatcher nor Blair, the most consistently successful election winners for their respective parties in modern history, were given that luxury. So why should a Prime Minister who loses be treated better than the election winner whom he replaced?

If such an eventuality were to happen, then recent history also explains why. Firstly, back in 1970 Harold Wilson lost a General Election but remains the last Labour leader to see a slide at the polls and still retain the top job. He held on because his grip on his party was so strong as much as anything else, because the slide was not too huge and it was perceived to be surmountable in an election (although it actually took two for Labour to win an outright, if slender, majority in the Commons.) The parallel with Brown is plausible. As the Sunday Times also reports in the same article:

“‘Gordon has said he believes his enemies in the party are too divided among themselves to force him out,” said a senior Labour source.’”

Which is perhaps the nub of it. After all, other recent coups have been very Laurel and Hardy in their planning and execution. If “execution” is remotely the appropriate word.