Move on, quickly

That’s what the Cabinet are trying to do, it’s what Downing Street will try and do, and it’s what Labour activists desperately want their party to do.

Yet undoubtedly there will be the desire to pick through what happened yesterday. Was Nick Robinson right by saying that six Cabinet ministers pledged to give Gordon the boot, was Eric Joyce right suggesting it was two, or were they all behind the PM as Lord Mandelson suggested (it didn’t appear that way)?

And what did Darling say in his one-on-one meeting with Brown, did he really ask him to go? Iain Martin of the Wall Street Journal says yes, Sky News’ Niall Paterson quotes an aide telling him it is “categorically, unequivocally not true”.

Every journalist in Whitehall will be digging, and probably many MPs will be too. Without any other big news story, this will dominate this week and coverage could continue into next week up to a demoralising PMQs. It’s not the initial story that causes damage to the party but how long it runs. The Cabinet took too long to try to kill it and even then didn’t really so it will be very tough to “get on with the job” for a while.

The Tories will want to keep the pressure on this and will probably steer clear of any big announcements of their own. The Liberal Democrats struggle to gain coverage anyhow, and given that yesterday Nick Clegg’s Mumsnet grilling was booted into touch, I can’t see how they could distract from this story even if they wanted to.

Now that tomorrow’s Cabinet meeting has been snowed off too, it’ll be next week before they’re all together. So each will stew and pick over the events of the last 24 hours. Two weeks of an election campaign and Jack Straw says that there are only, in his guess, fourteen more weeks to go. Will Cabinet colleagues now be able to work closely together or will this issue be lurking in the back of their minds throughout that campaign – each instead concentrating on their own campaigns to be Labour leader after the election?

The coup is over, but the recriminations aren’t. Meanwhile, Labour activists will be holding their heads in the hands as their party has needlessly thrown away a strong start to the general election campaign.

PS. Not only did a YouGov poll for today’s Sun find that gap between Labour and the Tories narrowing, it concluded that the majority of voters did not think a change of leader would change their vote. And Andrew Neil today points out news that indicates that the UK has climbed out of recession. This could have been a good week for Labour, will the Cabinet now be able to cope with the bad ones?

Close, but not close enough …

Alan Johnson, Ed Miliband and Alastair Darling have come out in favour in Brown and it appears that David Miliband and Jack Straw will do shortly. It’s hugely unlikely that Harman would go it alone so doubtless she’ll release a statement in due course. A secret ballot requires a cabinet members support.

This afternoon, Hoon and Hewitt have merely managed to further weaken their party and its leader and deflect from the positive coverage Brown would have got from a strong Prime Minister’s Questions. Left Foot Forwards has also picked up on a further Tory U-turn on marriage policy, which is now completely buried by Labour infighting. It could have been quite a good day for Brown, but now it’s a total disaster and it’ll take weeks to fully move on from this.

What’s especially evident is that many in the Cabinet did get close to pushing Brown out. They took hours to make statements of support and then Ed Miliband, Alan Johnson and Alastair Darling released them at roughly the same time. That makes it look as though they were all discussing it, I wonder how close to the brink they got.

If they’re willing to do that in a good week for the PM when he gets Cameron on the back foot and has a strong Prime Minister’s Questions, what will they do come a hung parliament? Judging from today, unless Brown wins an overall majority (which the polls aren’t predicting), he won’t be the next Prime Minister. Did they decide today who would be?

It’s the secret ballot that changes things

Hoon and Hewitt’s demand for a ballot on Brown is more important than it initially appears. Two has-beens, both standing down at the next election, don’t have nearly the gravitas of a cabinet minister resigning – and the Prime Minister has already survived that. It’s the secret ballot that makes this really interesting.

Both Hoon and Hewitt are weakened by their legacy as ministers and by their expenses claims. Geoff Hoon has been criticised at the Chilcott Inquiry for refusing to let the Army properly prepare for war in Iraq when he was Defence Secretary. He also has been accused of flipping his second home designation multiple times – but Brown stuck up for him.

And there’s something suspicious about Hoon’s timing: there were rumours at the last coup that he was bought off with the promise of a European job. He hasn’t got one, this could very well be sour grapes.

Patricia Hewitt presided over very real problems with the hiring of junior doctors when she was Health Secretary. She also had some questions over her expenses. Neither have the gravitas required to topple Brown without the power of ministerial office, which both of them lack.

Yet their suggestion that Brown hold a secret ballot means that their individual status isn’t particularly important – the idea they’ve put forwards is workable, compelling, and attractive to those who want to remove Brown without being seen to have blood on their hands. Had the idea been put forward in July, it most likely would have toppled Brown. But Hoon stayed loyal to Brown back then.

If Brown dismisses this out of hand, he’ll look like he’s afraid that he doesn’t have the support of the party and like he’s dodging a challenge. So soon before an election, this would undoubtedly weaken him, especially as he hasn’t won an election as Labour leader.

And if Brown does take up the challenge – I haven’t seen any polling of Labour party members, but going from gossip on twitter, blogs, newspapers and other unreliable titbits – it would appear that there is strong enough anti-Brown sentiment to remove him. And even if there isn’t, a close run ballot would still weaken him (Margaret Thatcher won the challenge against her but not convincingly enough to stay as leader).

It’s such a smart plan (although not strictly within the Labour Party rules) that combined with the involvement of but one cabinet minister resigning, it could be enough to remove Brown. Securing the PM will take all of Lord Mandelson’s talents, and given the rumours of a rift between them in recent months, he’s worth watching very closely indeed. His latest statement is hardly very supportive:

“No one should over-react to this initiative. It is not led by members of the government. No one has resigned from the government. The prime minister continues to have the support of his colleagues and we should carry on government business as usual.”

Those whose resignations would hurt the most (Darling, Harman, Straw) are so far silent (although Straw is rumoured to be saying something soon). Don’t dismiss this attempt out of hand, the secret ballot request is far more damaging than an outright attack.

Why I think the Afghanistan Elections have longevity …. (pt1)

This morning I’ve been debating with Niall Paterson of Sky News on twitter and in the comments of a previous post about whether the Lockerbie story will run and run.

I don’t think this story is the biggest political story of the moment, he does. I think the biggest issue is the Afghanistan elections, and here’s why:

The low turnout and fraud allegations in the Afghanistan election call into question the success of our tenure there, they show quite how vast a challenge reforming the country is. If democratic elections in Afghanistan weren’t the aim, what was?

The US have recognised this. President Obama is coming under huge pressure from liberals in his party. The US armed forces are changing strategy – trying to win “hearts and minds”. This even means that they are thinking of negotiating with the Taliban – the people we went in to take out. It cannot be underestimated how galling it is to be negotiating with them – it shows their strength, our weakness; it makes it seem as though nothing at all has been achieved. So the biggest question to Gordon Brown isn’t “did you agree with the Scottish decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds but “why did we go into Afghanistan; what do you think we will achieve?”

PS Ask yourself this, if operations in Afghanistan were working out, why would a journalist who had been embedded there for over a year call for a policy of “masterful inactivity?”. An adoption of this sort of policy would mean operations in Afghanistan would run for years and years and years. Currently a BPIX poll shows that two thirds of Britains want us to pull out of the country. No wonder Mr Brown is hinting at withdrawal.

Embarrassing Lockerbie coverage will continue … in the USA

This morning I asked a lobby journalist whether the “oil for al-Megrahi scandal” [©Chambers 2009] had legs. We both agreed that it didn’t for long: the published letters would give nothing substantial away, some would claim the wrong letters had been published (such as David Jones MP), but without further proof, the issue would die as MPs returned from the recess.

Now I have changed my mind. We were mostly right about the letters – and indeed the coverage and interviews have failed to throw up any substantial new leads¹. Perhaps Bill Rammell put pressure on the Scottish Executive but Alex Salmond has been redoubtable in his televised efforts to vindicate his government and even caused one BBC journalist to apologise to him.

Where we were wrong was on whether it was necessary for there to be new leads. The coverage would probably not have continued for much longer in the UK but the US media are determined to keep pressing on this issue.

This is because, in 2 weeks or so, Gordon Brown will be visiting Pittsburgh for the G20 summit. The al-Megrahi story will now dominate his visit to the USA, despite the refusal of the US government to discuss this issue anymore. US cable news will start to do what it does best: clamour. Watch the video below of NBC’s Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd on “Morning Joe” for what’s to come for Brown.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “msnbc.com Video Player“, posted with vodpod

¹UPDATE 1st September: Ok, so this Bill Rammell issue is becoming quite big but it in no way shows that Megrahi was released for oil. Mr Rammell purportedly said: “Neither the Prime Minister nor the Foreign Secretary would want Mr Megrahi to die in prison but the decision on transfer lies in the hands of Scottish Ministers”. This is no smoking gun. The issue once again is Gordon Brown’s opinion – quite a different issue to corruption.

The Fabled Thread of Dishonesty

I find the ‘l’ word in politics distasteful. I find its deployment worrying and the intention behind it even more so. ‘Lie’ is a powerful world, one which shouldn’t be watered down. Perhaps, a cynic might say, the ‘p’ word is better used in most cases: I speak of ‘politics’.

Is Gordon Brown telling ‘lies’? The Economist‘s Bagehot notes, a lie is ‘a falsehood advanced intentionally and knowingly’. Thus, Blair’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ cannot be deemed a lie unless it can be shown Blair did not believe this, even if the intelligence gathering was totally flawed.

The ‘l’ word is being bandied around recklessly this week. First, David Cameron stuttered just before saying it and went on to accuse the Brown Premiership of having ‘a thread of dishonesty’ running through it. The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson has done the same when discussing future government spending cuts. This has opened up a full scale spat with Schools Secretary Ed Balls – who made a pronouncement on government debt that Nelson believed was misleading.

Yet is obfuscating all the economic realities really lying? The economy is built upon expectations: the government are not going to want to talk down the economy at such a fragile stage. And given the specifics of economic data, which I have not forensically analysed, it is not certain except to those in power what the position of the government is at present and perhaps not to them either. I do not defend this status quo, I merely note that for this reason George Osbourne has yet to release his own spending plans.

So I’m reminded of Benjamin Disraeli’s old adage, there are ‘lies, damn lies, and statistics’. Issues of public spending fall under the statistics category.

Statistics are merely a tool in the armoury of a politician: smear by anonymous briefings, announcing strategies early to the media and making pronouncements on the policy of anothers’ department all play a part.

Take today’s announcement that Royal Mail privatisation is to be postponed because of market conditions(courtesy of the marvellous i spy strangers). This is pure politics.

Everyone knows that this measure was unpopular and that the rebellious Parliamentary Labour Party would not have been happy with their weakened leadership pushing such a measure through. The Prime Minister has already had to water down proposals to stall party rebels.  Yet who is to say this measure hasn’t been dropped because of of market conditions. Journalists can infer but cannot be absolute. That would be saying something without knowing it’s true. Dishonesty in politics is difficult to avoid.

In defence of Hazel Blears

Odd timing, you might think. Blears herself has noted that this is the lowest point of her political career, and there is good reason for this. But, the campaign against her is indicative of the rot at Westminster – the tribal political urges that only ever lead politics into the mire.

Blears flipped her home three times. For a while she wondered what it’d be like to live in a boutique hotel in Clerkenwell. At £211 a night, presumably it was pretty good. There’s no denying that she stretched her expense allowances.

The 17% who voted for the BNP in a recent by-election in her constituency no doubt agree. The polling figures look even worse when you contrast 606 Labour votes for 276 to the BNP. There was only a 17.5% turnout so we can assume many felt the same as is being said up and down the country – that there’s no-one to vote for and major parties can’t be trusted. Listen to John Pienaar’s podcast this week as an indicator of public opinion: pavement political reporting at its best.

Yet public opinion is, as usual, being manipulated – both by the press and those they require connections with. ‘Smeargate’ – the Damien McBride emails – exposed the government’s way of dealing with the press. It did not cure it. Despite both Geoff Hoon and James Purnell avoiding capital gains tax on the sale of their homes – furnished at taxpayer’s expense – they have had an easy time of late. So too has Alastair Darling, who flipped his second home but lived in a grace-and-favour pad. Why the focus on Blears?

Blair'z Babe Blearz

Because Blears brought it upon herself. She dared to criticise Gordon Brown in the Observer and knew the consequences of this. First, she damaged Gordon Brown’s credibility. After all, the phrase ‘YouTube if you want to’ was very witty and bound to stick, although if anyone thinks Brown’s disastrously comic video was anything other than an absolute failure, they mustn’t have seen it. Do please see below.

Second, she angered the Brownite cabal which was never enamoured with Blears the Blairite. The group of advisors surrounding Brown have always been effective at dispatching political enemies and excel at party infighting.