Words Dept.: entry

I fear Gordon Brown may be even worse than Tony Blair. His penchant for spin and adherence to short-term gain at the expense of long term vision has become depressingly obvious in the last few weeks, especially the last fortnight.

The problem is especially marked given that Brown initially tried to paint himself as a man of principle who represents a change from the ways of spin and the “politics of celebrity”. The entire thing is, quite clearly, bollocks.

I became increasingly convinced of this after reading (wait for it) a piece by Polly Toynbee (ahem) in the Guardian (aiee) yesterday. (I was on a train for four hours, what else was I supposed to do?)

There is a stunned disorientation among Labour MPs, alarmed by both Brown’s vision void and his sudden incompetence. Talk to ministers and wise old heads of Commons select committees, and they are reeling with shock. The backbenches sat through Darling’s politics-free performance on Tuesday like the Animal Farm beasts gazing through the farmer’s window in the final scene. Far too late they realised something awful was happening before their eyes: you could have cut their silence with a knife.

How has Gordon Brown managed in such a short time to shipwreck himself and his party? The seriousness of it is only beginning to sink in after Labour’s long hegemony. Bungling the will-he-won’t-he election was a survivable self-inflicted injury. The intellectual injury is the real damage. Retreating armies raze the ground behind them to deny their enemy forage: but what Brown and Darling did on Tuesday was to flame-throw the ground ahead, right up to the far horizon beyond the next election. They have nowhere to go, nothing to feed on, no narrative path ahead, no clear political turf to occupy.

As well as a nice use of the phrase “vision void”, Toynbee credits Brown with the spawning of “fusion politics” – a merge between the right and left, which, thanks to near-identical “policies” like inheritance tax reform, are born of oneupmanship and make any difference between Labour and the Tories less noticeable than ever.

Still, Dave “Call Me Arnie” Cameron and his rabble are an even less appealing proposition. But, for the first time in ten years, it seems possible they could actually win the next general election.