The Daily Novel

Gordon Brown, presently across the channel with Prince Charles, will be going to see the Queen in Buck House within days rather than weeks, to offer his resignation. This prediction is made before the results of Thursday’s European election have been announced. Because the Euro result will tell us nothing tangible. It will provoke a guessing game as to whether the result proves better or worse than expected for Labour. And an even bigger guessing game; trying to calculate how British voters would have voted on Thursday if they had been voting in a general election, instead of for European MPs and some local councillors.

As I realised yesterday, when doing my analysis of the council elections, the three elections are so different that that, however good the analysis, it is just not possible to predict the results of one of these elections from the behaviour of voters in the other two.

Even in normal times.

And we are not living in normal times.

So instead I have done an analysis of the Saturday newspapers, the Saturday television and radio programmes, and the Sunday newspapers, already available on the web, before breakfast.

The dominant message from the headlines, and from those ministers who are prepared to speak on radio and television or to be quoted in the newspapers, is that Brown’s the ministers have now decided that changing the leader before the election would be more damaging than damaging than sticking with Brown. And it is not only ministers who are peddling this line. Jon Cruddas, perhaps Brown’s fiercest critic on the back benches and the leading left wing potential candidate for the leadership, calls on the party to unite behind Brown in a signed article for the Mirror.

But all the newspapers are full of long stories about the events of the past few days, which provide lots of evidence about what ministers have been saying to the political journalists ‘off the record’. And who actually called the shots in last the re-shuffle.

It was none other than the Prince of Darkness himself. Peter Mandelson is now said to be deputy Prime Minister, though his offical title is First Secretary of State, and he is an un-elected peer, not even an MP. He is also Business Secretary and has been given responsibity for education as well. Which was part of the portfolio of Ed Balls, Brown’s closest friend and ally, who he was hoping to make Chancellor.

But forget titles and responsibilies. What nearly all the newspapers are agreed on is that Mandelson was the prime mover in last week’s events. It was Mandelson’s reshuffle.

You could say that he is Prime Minister in all but name. And understandably, Ed Balls, who is sometimes called the schools minister and sometimes called the childrens minister, is ‘furious’.

Both Guardian Unlimited and the Telegraph are now reporting that James Purnell did not act alone and that last week’s events were the work of several Blairites. The Mail, which pushed that view a couple of days ago, goes one better. They imply that the master mind who orchestrated the attempted coup was Tony Blair himself.

In a damning verdict on Mr Brown’s character, Mr Blair said of the Prime Minister recently: ‘The darkness in his heart and the lies will be his downfall.’

The source for this ‘quote’ is a ‘friend’ of Blair’s, who talked to him ‘recently’.

The Mail’s story today is remarkably similar to my spoof Daily Mail blog on Friday.

So I had better re-iterate that it was a spoof.

I do not believe that Blair is controlling his former colleagues like puppets on a string. I agree with today’s Independent, there was no plot in the accepted sense.

The reality is that the Blairites are now, and have been for some time, ex-Blairites. Including Lord Mandelson.

But all the newspapers carry reports of leaked emails written by Mandelson a year ago in which he makes a damning assessment of Brown’ character and political ability. Some of the newspapers suggest that these show how much Mandelson has changed his mind. Others imply that this is what he still feels.

In due course we shall discover the truth.

(Picture from The Guardian.)

Thursday’s  English local elections show there is no evidence that our democracy is in danger as a result of the month long exposure of MP’s expenses by the Daily Telegraph. This is the conclusion of my own analysis of the results. Before the voting started we all knew that the people were furious with what they had heard about the extravagant expense claims. The opinion polls showed it. As did the angry quotes from men and women in the streets and the re-actions of the audience on national programmes like BBC One Question Time and Radio Four Any Questions. But when the voters got to the polling booths they kept their cool.

The Tories won control of 30 councils, up seven. Labour lost control of four councils, leaving them none at all of those voting yesterday. The Lib Dems lost one council leaving them with one. The councils where no party has an overall majority fell by two to three. In terms of practical political power the results are a big success for David Cameron’s Conservatives. This is almost entirely due to our first past the post voting system.

The result in terms of seats won show a somewhat different picture. The Conservatives won 1476 seats, up 233 on last time. The Lib Dems won 473 down four. Labour won 176 seats, also down four. The others won 164 seats, up 37. (The differencces are again explained by first past the post, which favours the winning party, and the councils voting yesterday were mostly Conservative strongholds.)

The overwhelming majority of the others are the independents, who won 118 seats, up 21. The independents are the survivors of one of the best British political traditions. Local citizens, from all walks of life, who fight and win local elections. They belong to no party at all, because they are well known in their neighbourhoods. They included in the town of my youth, small shop keepers, bus drivers and our window cleaner.).

Next biggest in the Others main group are ‘other others’, too diverse to be categorised, 22 seats up six. They are followed by the Greens, who won 16 seats up six.

The scare about voters turning away to the fringe parties is fuelled by fears of the BNP, which often sounds fascist, and UKIP, a right-wing party united only by a hatred of all things European. Both were fighting these particular council elections for the first time. UKIP won 6 seats. The BNP won 3 seats.

Hence my headline.

 But a lot of people are worried, because the figures quoted most prominently by the mainstream national media are the percentage figures of what the local results would mean to the parties share of the national vote in a general election. They are nearly all based on a complex formula devised by a Scotttish academic.

 What they show is the Conservatives in the lead with 38 per cent, the Lib Dems second with 28 per cent, Labour at a new low of 23 per cent and the others at 11 per cent.

They are, as I hope I have demonstrated here, extremely misleading. No formula can satisfactorily deal with translating local results for the ‘others’, to a national election, where there is no equivalent to the local independents who have been active in their backyards for years.

A much better guide to what the voters are doing is look at the actual seat figures. The 164 ‘others’ vote on Thursday, amounts to 7 per cent of the people who voted. But the total for the BNP, UKIP and the Greens, comes to just 1 per cent. These are the only three fringe parties who also contest national elections.

To conclude, the fears of a take-over by the extreamists are much exaggerated. But there is no doubt that the electorate wants a change of some kind. So I think the next election provides an opportunity for a few independent MPs on the national scene. So long as they are as famous as Esther Rantzen, Martin Bell and Joanna Lumley, they are in with a chance.

And that would be a good thing for our democracy.

Brown apparently has been winning back support today with his much changed reshuffle, which might keep him in office for a few more weeks. But his master stroke, bringing the the Sunday night reality television star, Alan Sugar, into the government, sounds the death knell for old Labour as well as new Labour. Sugar may be good for a hundred thousand or so,but the only Labour funders left with the millions needed to fight an election are the trade unions.

They are unlikely to rally to the cry of ‘You’re fired’ and Sugar’s jovial bullying. The kind of enterprising small businessmen Sugar is likely to encourage are those who don’t want any trade unionists interfering with their efforts to keep costs down to the consumer.

Sugar was a seriously good entrepreneur once. But that was in the 1980s when he pioneered the most successful British personal computer, the Amstrad PCW, a splendid low cost product. But The Apprentice fosters the barrow boys. The emphasis is on the selling.

And as for Brown’s promised polical reforms, it is a step backwards. Sugar has not been elected by anyone, and once given his seat in the House of Lords, he cannot be de-selected by anyone.

How’s that for restoring faith in our democracy?

Purnell’s bomb has not quite had the effect he wanted. Gordon Brown, though against the ropes, is still ducking and weaving. According to the political correspondents he has given up his plan to move his friend, Ed Balls, to the Chancellorship, and left Alastair Darling in post. Instead, he has moved Alan Johnson, the PM in waiting, from health to home secetar, the job he was pushing Darling to accept. And this morning he had one more resignation, John Hutton, the defence secretary, who is going for ‘family reasons’,; he has not, so far as anyone has reported, told Gordon to fall on his sword in his farewell letter.

All this comes from leaks from usually reliable sources to usually reliable journalists. But in the present rapidly changing hot house admosphere you better regard it as speculation.

After all, Brown might change his mind yet again before the ink is dry on the press releases.

I wrote my previous blog before reading today’s Daily Mail, who have discovered that it was a plot after all. According to the Mail, all the leading Blairites were acting according to the Mail:

They are working under Trotsky’s revolutionary dictum: ‘March separately, strike together.’

And the master mind behind the coup is a mistress. The dastardly columnmist of evil Guardian newspaper, Polly Toynbee. The Mail writes:

The Prime Minister has long had a difficult relationship with the paper – typified by the hot and cold musings on his leadership by columnist Polly Toynbee.

The Guardian’s grande dame, a heroine for bien-pensant champagne socialists, has performed an extraordinary series of exquisitely inconsistent flipflops since Mr Brown became Prime Minister………

But last month Miss Toynbee used her column to insist that Mr Brown ‘must go by June 5’.

His allies suspect she has played a key role in privately encouraging Labour backbenchers to act, persuading her editor to cut Mr Brown loose and sketching out a timetable for how he could be unseated.

What the Mail says has grains of truth. Toynbee has changed her mind several times about Brown (not necessarily a bad thing in a journalist whose job is to make up her mind as events unfold). And she is certainly a powerful intellect. And she is a child of the elite, her grandfather being Arnold, the distinguished historian, and her father having been a repected Observer journalist.

But the Mail ignores what the rest of us know about The Guardian. It probably has more journalists from the Oxbridge elite than any other newspaper. Many of them have brains as good as Polly’s and opinions quite as fiercely held. Editorial policy at The Guardian is hammered out after vigorous debate between equals, and by the editor, Alan Rusbridger, who is perfectly capable of making his own mind, after having listened to his colleagues.

And, even more important, it was this same Guardian, who was accused of under-mining the Blairites, and urging Blair to resign and pass on the job to Brown before he got his bus pass.

The truth is the Daily Mail has had a long-standing ‘difficult relationship’ with Polly Toynbee. They hounded the children of the married man Toynbee was having an affair with, after the early death of her husband. Toynbee did not take it lying down. She wrote a fierce column exposing the tactics of the Daily Mail.

As readers of this blog, and the history books, know, the Daily Mail frequently gets the story spectacularly wrong.

This time they got it wrong and missed the big story, written below, in my best attempt at Daily Mail style.

James Purnell says he acted alone. But the Daily Mail can reveal that Purnell was seen earlier this week going into a private dining room with his old boss, Tony Blair, who has temporarily taken time out from his new jobs of teaching at Harvard and solving the Middle East crisis, to stir things up for Gordon Brown. He is back in town, not making speeches, but running rings around Gordon again, just as he did at the famous Granita dinner, when he promised him, that if he supported Blair’s bid to be PM, he could have the job when Blair got fed up with it.

Tomorrow, I shall reveal who told Oswald to shoot Jack Kennedy.

The political landscape has certainly changed. After a month of trial by media, led by the Daily Telegraph’s drip by drip leaking of the lethal contents of the stolen computer disc, we now have a public assassination in the middle of the prime-time 10 PM television news. The work and pensions secretary, James Purnell, spent all day yesterday, while we were voting in the local and European elections, loading his shot-gun.

The timing was brilliant. He waited until the polls had closed, so no one could accuse him of making this election result worse for his party, and then he fired both barrels into the television news studios five minutes after the news had started. Proving that he combines the guile of John le Carrie’s Smiley with the quick action of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Like both of them he showed that he could dispense with protocol, exceed orders, break the rules, acting by his own conscience. He decided that the enemy of the British people was not the KGB or Goldfinger, but his own boss.

It was as if Bond had driven up Whitehall with his doctored Aston Martin and shot a poisoned dart into the guts of his own boss. M would have died painlessly without even knowing  who killed him. Gordon Brown is mortally wounded. He is fighting back. But nearly all the political correspondents think he cannot survive, and the longer he holds out the more painful his death will be.

And this is the chap whose day job is looking after us oldies. But he is he has so much adrenalin pumping around in his thirty-nine year old body, that he is blasting poor-old Gordon who is only two years away from the usual retirement age.

Sure, it’s better than stabbing him in the back. But since he began his letter, Dear Gordon, he might have waited for a reply before releasing it to the multitude.

Purnell apparently acted alone. His own closest friends and political allies had no warning of what he intended to do. He certainly showed he has guts. But then so do suicide bombers. And since he has done nothing illegal he may survive and be forgiven in a few years time.

Whether his act will restore the public’s trust in MP’s is more doubtful. He has stabbed the man who had reportedly been offered promotion to the education slot. Despite the fact that he has some questions to answer about his own expense claims.

This morning, on Day 28 of the Daily Telegraph’s drip by drip exposure of MP’s expenses, there were no new shockers. There was no need. The story has moved on. The Telegraph’s own headline was:

Gordon Brown fights for his political life

The Daily Mirror put in in one word:

MELTBROWN

Virtually the whole of Fleet Street is riding today on the back of the drippy tapes, with hundreds of journalists, circling Labour’s Prime Minister, seeking to be the first to announce his political obituary.

The hard news was bad enough. Communities secretary Hazel Blears dominated the television screens, resigning with a smile on her face. It was not what she said, it was the badge she wore, ‘Rocking the boat’, which rammed the message home. She could not have made a bigger impact, had she roared down Whitehall in her motor cycle leathers on the back of her husband’s motor bike.

All the newspapers have extracts from an email urging Brown to go circulating amongst Labour MP’s, which is due to be sent as soon as there are fifty signatures on it. But no journalist is sure whether nineteen or forty-nine people have signed it.

Is the House of Commons Brown praised his Chancellor, Alastair Darling, but refused to say that he would still be chancellor next week. Darling sat by his side, saying nothing, with the ghost of a smile on his face. In the printed press there are rumours that he slipped in to Downing Street yesterday. Was it to tell the Prime Minister that he would not switch to home secretary, are were they talking about the economy. No-one knows. Some newspapers report that two or three senior ministers are poised to tell Brown to go, if Labour finishes behind UKIP in today’s European and local elections. But no-one is prepared to name them.

Several newspapers report that the assassination squad is a group of Labour Amazons meeting in the tearooms, sharpening their knives, while the men relax in Annie’s Bar. This is the Daily Mail headline on that story.

The Labour WAGs: The Blair Babes who became the Women Against Gordon

But one of those leading wags, Jacqui Smith, who resigned as home secretary on Tuesday, was on the main television news last night insisting that Gordon was a wonderful prime minister who deserved our votes.

It is not yet over. In the last two days Britain’s two leading left of centre newspaper, The Guardiian and The Independent, have written weighty editorials calling for Brown to go. The Times has thundered editorially in the last two days and its columnists have been shooting at both sides.

This morning it carries a thoughtful article by Matthew Parris, a former Tory MP. He warns us not to get carried away in the frenzy.

The six most misleading words in the lexicon of politics are “it can’t go on like this.” It almost always can.

The Queen will not ask Mr Brown to relinquish national leadership unless he loses the Commons. It is fantasy to suppose that in an Opposition no-confidence debate Labour rebels could tip the vote against him. Such a motion would be just as likely to frighten the sheep back into the fold, consolidate Mr Brown’s grip on his party and steady morale. He can choose anyone he wants for his Cabinet next week.

His penultimate paragraph is even more emphatic.

But don’t be surprised if, in a couple of months’ time as we head off on our summer holidays, we look back on this week as a strange and fevered time in which the Labour Party almost screwed up its courage to mount the challenge it knows it should to its benighted bully of a leader - and then, yet again, lost its nerve.

Yesterday, when the mainstream press were telling us all, that Gordon Brown was going to soldier on until an election next June, by which time the electorate woud have realised he was right all along. Right to encourage the likes of Fred the Shed, to collect a multi-million pound pension for losing the shareholder’s savings.

Four million pounds for failure. Granted by Gordon Brown, supposedly a Labour Prime Minister.

Yesterday, I said he should go, to reduce the vote of the electorate against him.

This evening, the same political journalists who yesterday were saying he would soldier on, are now saying that he is battered, bemused and bewildered.

Not gossip, because his senior ministers are resigning.

So his much heralded re-shuffle after the electorate gives its verdict, via the local and European elections on Thursday, is dead in the water before he attempts to float it.

 This evening, the only serious Labour supporter in our ‘free’ national press, The Guardian, told Brown the game was up. Here is the conclusion of their editorial.

But Mr Brown has shown himself incapable of collaborating in this way. His disastrous announcement of expenses reform on YouTube showed that he cannot build the coalitions of interest (inside his party, never mind beyond) that are necessary for constitutional change. If reform is not to stall, someone else will have to lead it.

This explicit message was preceded by a few hours, by the only other left of centre British daily newspaper, The Independent, owned by the free-thinking, but currently financially threatend Irishman, Tony O’Reilly. Their financial position is precarious, because of the grave financial crisis, caused by the behaviour of, along with many other, Gordon Brown, and his then financial adviser, Ed Balls.but those journalist who remain, working for commitment, rather than self-interest, told Brown to go.

The only ’supporters’ Brown has left, are in the right-wing press. Like The Times, which does not editoralise this evening, but has a very, very long article by one of its star columnists, Daniel Finkelstein.

Some of it is about Brazilian football, which is presumably because when Murdoch bought The Times, he parried criticism by assuring all the sceptics, that he would maintain the Times reputation for covering sport brilliantly as well as national and international politics.

Most of Finkelstein’s article was about John F. Kennedy, which Finkelstein relates from the books he has read. Unlike me, he was not there in New York when Kennedy was elected.

But nothing Finkeltein has to say about Jack Kennedy is of any relevance to the present situation we have here with our current Presidential style Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. But Funkelstein (sic) at the end of this very long article, offers some support for poor old Gordon.

It is hard to believe, isn’t it, that Gordon Brown can carry on like this. It’s extraordinary to think he might. But, really, he can. He shouldn’t do, he might not, but he can.

That’s not exactly the kind of resounding endorsement which will save Brown. But it is repayment by Funkelstein, and his boss, Rupert Murdoch, for the many favours which Brown, and New Labour, bestowed on the man, who, is the owner of Fox Television in the US, which makes the BNP look like a bunch of amateurs, in terms of inciting racial hatred.

Remember, it was Fox, who continually through the US Presidential campaign referred to Obama as Barack Hussein Obama, and insisted he was a closet Muslim, although he, and his wife and family believe he is a Christian.

So Gordon Brown still has friends. But not many amongst his own party. Mostly, amongst the business tycoons whose fortunes he helped to make, when he was New Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Day 26 of the Daily Telegraph revelations picked off another Cabinet minister, Geoff Hoon, the Transport Secretary. In his zeal to get the most out of the expenses system by flipping his second home, he managed, like Alastair Darling, to charge for two homes at once, for a short period. He learnt something from yesterday’s debacle over the Chancellor. He immediately wrote out a cheque for £384 and apologised for what he called ‘an inadvertent admistrative error’. But, if Brown chops Darling, can he keep Hoon, who appears to done the same thiing?

Most of the political correspondents this morning don’t agree with me. They think that Brown will manage to tough it out as leader right up to the next election. But Darling has been written off and several are talking up Ed Balls, the schools secretary, to succeed him. But the political correspondents spend even less time talking to voters in the constituencies than do ministers. They are almost certainly under-estimating the anger of the voters against Brown, who has been the captain on the bridge, while the parliamentary ship has been sinking into the sleaze.

The Daily Mail’s business editor, Alex Brummer, stands alone this morning in suggesting that Balls is a bad choice for chancellor. He reminds us, that Balls was the special adviser to Brown when he was chancellor, and was with him, the joint architect of the policies which got us into the worst financiial crisis since the 1930s. Continuing Thatcher’s policies of leaving the City to regulate itself. Down-grading the regulatory function of the Bank of England. Finding £5 billion to fund youth un-employment by raiding defined salary pension schemes.

The best man for Chancellor? You must be joking, Gordon.

How much longer can material from the stolen disk dominate the newspaper headlines and main television news? Yesterday and today have been dominated by the second shots at Darling and Hoon, which were pictured in the Rouge’s Gallery on Day One of Drippygate. What we are seeing is a second trawl of the material by the Telegraph.

Yesterday the rest of the media slavishly followed. So last night the expenses saga got more prime television news time than the first major interview with President Obama by the BBC’s Justin Webb. Which was a great pity. I listened to the full version on the BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning. It helped to restore my faith in politicians.

While British politics is fiddling about fiddling, Obama is behaving like a statesman. Considering how to regulate the banks and businessmen. And dealing with the nuclear threat from North Korea and Iran. Not by sending in the calvary. But by talking to them. And by setting an example. Reducing by far the biggest nuclear arsenal held by the US and Russia.

Today’s revelations from the Daily Telegraph, were very small drips, but the political fallout during the day has been building up to an avalanche. Gordon Brown looks ever more desperate, as he sticks his finger in the dyke, to try and stem the tides of outrageous fortune. Unlike King Canute Brown has been bruised and battered by tides unleashed by the now-twenty-five day drip by drip Telegraph stories. We used to call it the Torygraph. But perhaps we should rename it the Dripagraph. Because this story is now virtually certain to get a place for the Daily Telegraph in history next the Washington Post, who brought us Watergate.

By this evening Brown has dug himself into a hole where he seems to be repudiating his own Chancellor of the Exchequer, when the nation is in a financial crisis. He still says he is determined to tough it out til next year.

But in a situation like this, the British Prime Minister, is an Emperor with no clothes. Unlike a US President a British Prime Minister is not a chief executive. In order to take executive action he needs to have the support of his cabinet. As of now most of them are still maintaining a loyal courtier’s position in public. But their lack of enthusiasm is demonstrated by their silence.

So if I was a betting man, I would be putting my money down not on a cabinet reshuffle after Thursday’s local and European elections. But on a Brown resignation instead.