The Daily Novel

Gordon Brown is floundering not just, or even primarily, because of sleaze. He is sinking because of the fundamental contradictions of New Labour, of which he was, along with Tony Blair, the principal architect. New Labour was an attempt to make Labour electable by courting big business and the tabloid press. To some extent both men became the victims of their own success. They adapted so successfully to the thinking and behaviours of their new friends that they neglected the interests and beliefs of their own core supporters.

When Brown took power he made a serious attempt to differentiate himself from Blair, not least by projecting himself as Mr Clean, the honest man who was, and is different in personality and beliefs, from Blair, who is quick witted and gifted with agile footwork so that he can position himself with the appearance of speaking for both sides at once.

The balls up over party funding has its origins in New Labour’s attempt to distance itself from its links with the trade union movement, which historically has been the main funders of Labour. They felt they had to demonstrate that they were not the prisoners of the trade union bosses. This led them into courting contributions from businessmen, who, as Lloyd George knew only too well, tend to want something for their money.

Blair got away with it in the cash for honours fracas, because the police were unable to find enough evidence to prove a direct link between the honours and the donations. Brown is not so lucky. Thanks to the efforts of the Mail on Sunday’s investigation he was forced to admit that contributions totalling more than £600,000 were clearly illegal and must be returned. All came from one rather flaky businessman called David Abrahams, who gave some of his money via blank cheques from his employees and friends.

Thus far only one Labour Party figure has admitted that he knew where these donations came from at the time they were donated. Peter Watt, the general secretary of the Labour Party has admitted he knew and duly fell on his sword on Monday. Jon Mendelsohn, a businessman friend of Brown’s who was appointed head of fund raising in September, has admitted he did discover the illegalities. But he did nothing about it until the Mail on Sunday journalists started asking their questions. Even then he did not tell the police or the electoral commission, he wrote a warm letter to Abrahams asking for a meeting.

All the other senior figures, from Gordon Brown downwards, say they knew nothing. Maybe they are speaking literal truth. And since there is nothing wrong with their sight the only explanation is that they guilty of looking the other way.

Take Jack Dromey, who as well as being the husband of Harriett Harman, is also Treasurer of the Labour Party. In the cash for honours enquiry he insisted he was told nothing, and he is saying the same thing this time. Again, possibly literally true. But surely it was his job to ask questions and insist on answers as to where big donations came from. Particularly after what had happened over cash for honours.

What we do know already is that some people did know. What the police will have to discover is the different behaviour of senior figures. Gordon Brown himself rejected Abrahams money for his leadership campaign. Hilary Benn rejected it for his deputy leadership campaign on the advice of Baroness Jay, who was involved in Labour’s own inquiry into cash for honours. Harriett Harman accepted the tainted money and was actually routed towards it by Gordon Brown’s leadership campaign organiser, Chris Leslie. And yesterday another minister, Peter Hain, revealed that he had accepted Abrahams money but had failed to declare it because of an ‘administrative error’.

The most charitable view can take of all this is to assume that these decisions were made on the basis of nods and winks rather than clear statements and some people misinterpreted the nods and winks.

But the real lesson for the Labour Party, and the one it should take to heart when choosing a new leader to replace Brown, is that it should look after the interests of its traditional friends and deal with the rest with a very long spoon. And it needs to decide its policies with the same priorities.

The real scandal of Northern Rock, which still has to be addressed, is that the company was able to prosper because the Government, and notably Brown as chancellor, went along with a massive volume of lending to people who could not afford the mortgages they were taking on. Most of these were poor and ignorant, the people whom Labour should be caring for. Northern Rock was different from the rest simply because it riskily put more of its mortgage book onto sandy foundations. The others were more prudent with their shareholders’ money but the people they lent to who are now being caught by the fall in house prices will suffer just as much as those who took mortgages from Northern Rock, if the Government does not bail them out.

New Labour was famously conceived at a posh restaurant in Islington by Blair and Brown. Candidates for the Labour leadership, before they make their bid, should check on a meeting in nearby Farringdon Street on February 27, 1900. That meeting led to the founding of the Labour Party. It was called by the Trade Union Congress and attended by a mixture of full-blooded Marxist-orientated Socialists as well as the representatives of the workers. It established Labour as a broad church embracing middle class intellectuals and workers, and Christians and atheists. The enemy was un-regulated capitalism. It was a stormy meeting. But many of the issues are as real today as they were then.

Labour, old or new, is nothing if it fails to listen the voice of the trade unions.

Most of the heavyweight media commentators have been saying the storms currently besetting Gordon Brown will blow over. Their rationale is that he has been hit by what Harold Macmillan called, ‘events, dear boy’. My own reading of the events of the last few weeks is not only that Gordon Brown should resign. But that even if he does not want to he will have to. And my prediction is that when the next General Election is called, whether it is soon or at the last constitutional moment, the leader of the Labour Party who will fight it will not be Gordon Brown.

In terms of the ordinary citizen the most serious of the ‘events’ which have hit Gordon Brown is the revelation that the newly merged Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise has lost a disk containing the banking details of 25 million citizens. Which is more than half the entire adult population. They are being urged to check their bank accounts regularly in case someone is siphoning away their hard-earned savings.

This is not Gordon Brown’s fault. And he should be devoting most of his Prime Minister’s priority time in ensuring that these disks are found before someone starts taking money out of the bank accounts of 25 million citizens.

What is Gordon Brown’s fault is the debacle over Northern Rock, which rose to fame and fortune on his policies, and which has been bailed out by the Bank of England with taxpayers’ money. Because, businessmen as they were, they built up an empire which took the savings of ordinary people and put them at risk.

What is most definitely Gordon Brown’s fault is the current debacle about the funding of the Labour Party during the period when he, along with Tony Blair, was running the Labour Party. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows of the rows between Blair and Brown when Blair was Prime Minister. But both of them created the image of new Labour which was deemed to be friendly to businessmen.

But the businessmen they have espoused are people like David Abrahams, a property developer in the northeast. He has been the biggest contributor to Labour Party funds since 2003. Yet, according to the journalists who have done some serious work, his declared assets are about £244,000. So the money he has been giving to the Labour Party must come from various off-shore funds. And he has given it to the Labour Party undercover by causing some of his employees to donate it. But two of those employees say they did not know this? But they are supposed to have signed the cheques? Were their signatures forged? Are their memories mistaken? We should be told.

I do not impugn the personal integrity of Gordon Brown, whom I first met many years ago shortly after Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party. I think he is a misguided honest man. He has made a serious attempt to free Labour from their dependence on funding by the trade union movement and to make Labour acceptable to businessmen like Rupert Murdoch. In other words to demonstrate that Labour is not anti-business.

What has happened over the last few years is not all Gordon Brown’s fault. It is to do with the love affair between the new Labour of Blair and Brown and their attempt to get cosy cosy with big business.

Labour is not the party of big business. It is supported by millions of people who are the victims of big business. And of the behaviour of businessmen.

In the last few months both Gordon Brown himself and Hilary Benn, the environment minister, refused to accept the clandestine contributions from Abrahams (although Benn, the son of Tony Benn, did accept a perfectly legal cheque from Abrahams himself). But Harriet Harman did accept the dishonest and illegal contribution from one of Abrahams’s  employees. She says she had no idea, etc, etc.

But Harman is married to Jack Dromey who is the treasurer of the Labour Party. In the cash for honours enquiry he went public and said that he was not told about any of this. But he is the treasurer of the Labour Party. In this round he was back on national television tonight insisting he knew nothing of these matters?

So why has he not resigned? How on earth does he construe his post as Treasurer of the Labour Party, if he is not told who is financing the Labour Party. Which is what he is saying.

The only person who has resigned so far is Peter Watt, the Labour Party General Secretary. But tonight on national television David Triesman, who was the Labour party general secretary, says he knew nothing of these arrangements. Since I know him even better than the other particapants in this sorry affair, I know that he is speaking the literal truth.

Triesman did not know the truth because he did not ask questions. About the main source of Labour Party finance while he was in office.

As for Jack Dromey I cannot understand why he has not resigned as Labour Party treasurer. During the cash for honours scandal he continually proclaimed that he had not been told anything about it. That is exactly the stance he is adopting tonight. What is happening is terribly wrong. But he appears to think it is nothing to do with him.

But he is the Labour Party treasurer. Surely he should resign forthwith, not because he has done anything wrong, but because if the Labour Party cannot even tell their own treasurer what is happening, there is something very seriously wrong.

How can Jack Dromey continue to play the role of treasurer of the Labour Party when he has apparently not been told who their major donors are?

While I have been complaining of feeling like death’s door, laid low by the very trivial bug that is doing the rounds, two of my contemporaries have actually died. Within a couple of days of each other. And co-incidentally of the same final illness, kidney failure.  Both were swashbuckling risk-takers who might easily have managed to kill themselves years ago. In fact, they died quickly and relatively peacefully in bed.

Norman Mailer managed to make it to 84 despite his many excesses. And was writing prolifically up until the end. In 1960, when I was living in New York, he was challenging death by walking the parapet of his high rise Manhattan apartment while half pissed and by swapping punches in late night brawls with men bigger them him. He was pushing the boundaries in all sorts of directions, not all of them acts of high courage. He used a knife on one of his wives, nearly killing her, and beat up another so badly that she was lucky not be maimed.

Though there is universal agreement that The Naked and the Dead the war novel he wrote as a young man, is one of the best war novels of all time, there is less agreement about whether Mailer ranks with the greats of American literature. The long Guardian obituary by James Campbell makes the case for, demonstrating how in his fiction and in his outstanding journalism he was addressing the vital issues facing the Americans of his generation. The Guardian also carried the most pungent anti verdict, a short article by Joan Smith, who rates him as ‘a sexist, homophobic reactionary’. Her concluding sentence packs a punch which would have put Mohamed Ali out for the count:

More grand reactionary than great writer, Mailer was a faux-radical who used the taboo-breaking atmosphere of the 60s as cover for a career of lifelong self-promotion.

My own verdict is somewhere in the middle. Mailer’s political views were a mixture of reactionary and revolutionary. And as a writer he was deeply in the macho tradition of writers like Hemingway. But he was totally serious about pushing the boundaries of writing and experimenting. He pushed the notion of the stream of consciousness initiated by James Joyce and Henry Miller to further extremes. This involves temporarily suspending the critical faculty and allowing the pen to take dictation from the unconscious. This technique can produce a lot of rubbish but it led Mailer to new insights, and passages of beauty and wisdom. Some of the earliest efforts can be found in Cannibals and Christians.

John Gough, my cousin, who died on Monday aged 67, did not spend much time in his life reading books, let alone writing them. He was five years younger than me, the eldest child of my mother’s sister. He went to grammar school when I was at my most studious, discovering in the world of books, lives far more interesting than I could observe in Wolverhampton. John, by contrast, wanted to have a good time, to taste life, and in his own kind of way to push the boundaries. To be his own man and make his own mark.

He did OK, making himself a tidy sum as a speculative builder. Then came a recession and he promptly lost it all in one fell swoop. He went to Canada, made a fresh start and establishing a new life. Back in England some twenty years ago he was struck down by a massive heart attack. Which left him incapable of doing any more building work. But he never lost his zest for life and his ability to convey that zest to the people around him. Fortified from time to time by that glass of whisky, which he was not supposed to drink.  

Tonight, despite this dratted bug, I shall raise a glass of whisky myself and toast Norman Mailer and John Gough who both lived their lives to the full.

Since I arrived back in Charmouth last Friday afternoon I have spent most of the time asleep. Some cold or flu-type bug hit me so I decided to ride it out rather than run for the anti-biotics. It has worked in the past and it is a few years now since I have had to resort to the pills.

Through Sunday night the symptoms were still escalating so when I awoke on Monday morning I decided that the time had come for me TO DO SOMETHING. So I rang one of the two medical practices in the village. Engaged the first three times but at the fourth attempt I got through to a human being. (No automated message, thank God.) They were fully booked today, she told me, but she could fit me in at 9.15 AM on Tuesday. I settled for that and had another nap.

Monday night was not as bad as Sunday and I was feeling almost cheerful when I arrived in the doctor’s consulting room. First, my temperature. He picked up his electronic thermometer, pressed a few buttons, then shook it. Finally apologised that he did not have his old one handy. But neither of us needed an instrument to know that my temperature was neither dangerously high or low.

His stethoscope worked and he declared that I had a chest infection. There was a bug doing the rounds and it fitted my symptoms precisely. They would have no effect on the infection so I did not need to take them. Unless I started spitting up green as well as my present production of white and light yellow.

Today the symptoms seem to be gradually receding. And I have had not a bad day but the inactivity has made me aware that I have been in a depressive phase for several days now. Triggered, as is usual, by several factors.

Sitting out on the terrace just now I decided that I should write about it. But still I did not move from my chair. What’s it like? As if my pen is anchored a Sisyphus like stone.

That absurdity did get my out of my chair and at the computer. But from this vantage point it does not seem so absurd. There is no pleasure in my writing. And I do feel a bit like he must have felt pushing that stone up the hill, with the growing realisation that he was never going to get there.

Just like me now, because I have totally forgotten what the end of this blog was going to be. But I do remember that what got me out of my chair was gazing at the sunset. The sky was tinged with pink. It was under-stated sunset, a sharp contrast to the spectacular blazing dawn, a picture of which accompanied the last blog I wrote on 22 October.

Looking at this sunset I realised that I was feeling a deep melancholy. And melancholy is not the same as depression so just how it differs would take more than a blog to consider.

So if I survive the bugs and the glooms my next post is likely to be around the issues raised by David Leigh’s lecture at City University, The End of The Reporter (us journalists are not afraid to exaggerate.) Meanwhile here’s a link to press gazette whose reporter Dominic Ponsford, covered the lecture and also wrote this reprise.