The Daily Novel

Since I wrote the first part of this blog, as recently as last Friday, the stock markets of the world have been down and up like a yo-yo. And the world’s journalists have been - hour by hour - trying to make sense of what is happening.

With difficulty.

While i was writing on Friday, the markets were plunging. And over the weekend many of the media commentators were saying that this was indeed the most serious panic since 1929. Markets continued to fall on Monday, but on Tuesday they staged a sparkling recovery. Today, they have plunged again.

I have every sympathy with journalists who are working around the clock to make sense of what is happening. Their problem is that history never repeats itself exactly. Their problem is now, is also, which facts do you report?

Do you report what the economists and financial journalists or saying? Do you try and make sense yourself of what political leaders are saying and make a judgement about the trilions of government money being ploughed into the markets?

No-one, political leaders, economists, veteran journalists,, can be sure about what is happening today.

But we can be reach quite a lot of agreement about what happened in 1929.

 That crash happened in the first year of the Republican administration of Herbert Hoover. Hoover reacted by tightening the purse strings which made things worse. Which led to the depression of the 1930s and which in turn led to the election of the Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt in 1932. With his New Deal policies which is the nearest thing to socialism in American history. Pumping government money into the economy and providing jobs for the growing body of the unemployed.

It took several years but Roosevelt’s policies took the world out of the Depression. And both Britain and America became wedded to the mixed economy.

Not pure capitalism.

Not communism or even socialism.

Until 1979 when Margaret Thacher took over as Prime Minister in Downing Street on an agenda which rejected the consensus and applauded the supreamacy of the market and free market capitalism. She was follewed by Ronald Reagan, who brought the same verities to the USA. Thatcher thinking ruled Britain, and led to the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

In the US Bill Clinton interrupted the trend, by moving back to the notion of a mixed economy and an American foreign policy based on dialogue with the other nations of the globe.

Al Gore, who took up his mantle, was defeated by a wafer thin majority by George W Bush, who voiced the fervently held opinions of an important American minority the right wing Christian/Republicans.

They have ruled the world for the last eight years and taken us into the Iraq war and the financial crisis, which has left home-owners in the US and Britain in danger of having their houses sold over their heads.

George W has in the last few days done a u-turn, the biggest u-turn, in history. By effectively nationalising a chunk of the US banks.

But unlike Hoover in 1932 George W has less than a month before the next election. And the Democratic champion Barack Obama has since the financial crisis of the last two weeks lept to a 21 per cent lead in the opinion polls.

This analysis obviously is based partly on my opinions.

But the plain facts are that on November 4 America will have a new leader. And unless things change again (which they may do) that leader will be Barack Obama.

America will have a leader who is committed to the mixed economy, who is an admirer of Franlin D Roosevelt and who believes that the way forward for America is dialogue with other countries in the world, rather than telling them that the US way is best.

So maybe the 2008 Great Crash is not the death of American consumer capitailsm. Merely the death of Thatcherism and the right wing Christian Americans who put George W in the White House.

And maybe Barack Obama will go down in history as the President  who fulfilled the aspirations of that great Republican Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves. Maybe on November 5 we will all wake up to know that the voice of America is the voice of one of America’s blacks.

 With Hilary, who is now my wife, and was then working with me as a researcher, we allowed ourselves a brief holiday in Saratoga, not much more than a weekend. We thought of Adelaide’s Lament in Guys and Dolls:

 When they get on that train to Niagara
And she can hear church bells chime
The compartment is air conditioned
And the moon sublime
Then they get off at Saratoga for the fourteenth time!
A person can develop la grippe,

Then we settled down, in the old Times Newspapers of Great Britain offices on the corner of 42nd Street and Third Avenue, to the hardest work of a lifetime.

The result was a book, published as An American Melodrama, that changed my life. It made a lot of money, though not for me. I was working on the staff of the Sunday Times, and the paper owned the rights and took the profits. But ever since I have been hired by publishers in New York to write a string of books about American history and politics. But the election also changed life for 300 million Americans too.

 We were in our early 30s then, and capable of working in a way that gives me nightmares even to remember. We had to get the book out before Teddy White, the reigning champion for election books, did. We had an extra reason for beating him. White came up to me at a friend’s house and said, unprovoked, “So you are one of the three wise monkeys who think if you type enough you write Shakespeare?”

We typed, all right. I and my two co-authors, Lew Chester and Bruce Page, produced a book of 789 pages in about six weeks. We frequently wrote all night. I remember one particular evening when, after 12 hours at the typewriter, we staggered out of the office and walked up Third Avenue in the snow into P.J. Clarke’s bar, a classic New York Irish watering hole, where the waiters wore green aprons and you peed on blocks of ice in the gents. We stayed there until four a.m., first eating, then drinking, and at all times arguing, before slumping into bed for a few hours and then back to the typewriter in the morning.

That Heraklean labour was the culmination of a year covering what was the most exciting and the most important American presidential election — until this one.

 1968 began with all the interest on the Democratic side. Succeeding the murdered Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson had thrown his titanic energy into passing the civil rights bill of 1964. He followed it with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As he signed it he murmured to an aide, “There goes the South”, and that when the Solid South, Democratic ever since Lincoln freed the slaves, turned Republican.

 Johnson tried to end poverty in America, and committed America to victory n Vietnam. By early 1967, he was deeply unpopular. Surreptitiously at first, then more boldly Democrat operatives were looking for a plausible candidate to challenge Johnson. They talked to John Kenneth Galbraith, but he was foreign-born, in Canada. They talked to Martin Luther King, but he would not do it. They canvassed liberal senators, but none would risk their career against an incumbent president who seemed invincible, until they persuaded senator Eugene McCarty to run.

 McCarthy (who had nothing but Irish blood and Catholic faith in common with the other McCarthy, senator Joe) was a liberal Catholic, a poet, and an unpredictable politician. My colleagues, freshly arrived from London, saw him as a man of the Left, and it was true that many of the most idealistic young people in America joined his “Children’s Crusade”. I knew, however, because I had been working in Washington before, that McCarthy had infuriated liberals by his systematic cosying up to the big oil and gas interests.

 The great question for the American Left was whether Bob Kennedy, who notoriously detested Lyndon Johnson (a book about their relationship was accurately entitled “Mutual Contempt”) would enter the race. If he did, he would be a stronger candidate than McCarthy, an obvious fact which McCarthy’s supporters, some of them close friends of mine, hated to hear.

Then, on March 12, a psephological bomb exploded. In the New Hampshire primary, which normally an incumbent president would have been expected to win easily if he even bothered to enter, President Johnson got 49 per cent of the vote. And senator Gene McCarthy got 42 per cent.

Nineteen days later, Lyndon Johnson inserted two sentences at the end of a nation-wide television speech. “I have concluded”, he said, “that I should not allow the presidency to be involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year. Accordingly I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president”.

After soul-searching, cold calculation and many changes of mind, Bob Kennedy entered the race. I went with him to California, when he first sussed out his chances. I tried to describe the extraordinary yearning for the crowds who surrounded him when he spoke from the back of a flatbed truck. In a pyramid of uplifted arms. I was with him again on June 4, when he won the California primary, and looked set to win first the Democratic nomination, and very possibly the election. I was in the hall when he gave his last speech, and I and a colleague were due to interview him, when he was murdered in the adjoining hallway by a Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan.

What we largely ignored in the excitement of that tumultuous election, was the real import of the 1968 election.

 It was Richard Nixon who won. And Nixon’s victory marked the end of 35 years of Democratic hegemony in American politics, and the beginning of 40 years of the conservative Republican ascendancy.

To be sure, Nixon’s domestic policy turned out to be more liberal than many expected. But Nixon won, in 1968 and far more decisively four years later, in large part because of his “southern strategy”: by appealing, that is, to white southerners to abandon their Democratic inheritance and vote Republican.

 Six years after his 1968 victory, Nixon was gone, just ahead of impeachment. The immediate result was a brief recovery for the Democrats. But then came Ronald Reagan, a more robustly ideological conservative. Only when Bill Clinton, parroting Reagan’s language about the end of the need for strong government, but also insisting that it was “the economy, stupid”, took advantage of George H. W. Bush’s failure to read the national mood, did a Democrat return to the White House.

 This year, forty years after 1968, the issue was whether the conservative ascendancy would end. Was this what the political scientists call a defining election? Now a Republican administration had got the nation into a disastrous war, had shown itself comically incompetent in dealing with Hurricane Katrina, had favoured its rich constituency with unfair tax breaks in a shameless way?

 For months, it seemed as if an opportunity for decisive, ideological change, would be missed. Senator Barack Obama called for change. It was his slogan. But in practice, as he competed for votes with senator Hillary Clinton, just like senators McCarthy and Kennedy in 1968, the election seemed bogged down in technicalities. Who could raise the most money? Who could spend it most effectually in caricaturing the policies and the personality of the rival?

Then like Nixon in 1968, after the disaster of senator Goldwater, the Republican overwhelmed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, senator John McCain rose from the ashes. Now, days before the vote on November 4, senator Obama is ten percentage points ahead. Republican economics have brought the American economy and the world economy to the very brink of catastrophe. Now all that can save the conservative ascendancy is crass innuendo with coded racism from senator McCain’s desperate running-mate.

 Will it work? Will we see a “Bradley effect”? That is the name, drawn from the fate of a black mayor of Los Angeles, who led in the polls and lost on the hustings, for the American voters who will tell pollsters they will vote for a black candidate, but don’t when they or pull the lever of a voting machine. Poor Tom Bradley is not the only example of that sadly prevalent electoral habit.

So, forty years after Dick Nixon came up on the rails to pip Hubert Humphrey, once again the American electorate faces a choice between ideological optimism — what Barack Obama calls “the audacity of hope” — and shameful, surreptitious racism. It has happened too often before in American elections, local, state and national.

Will Barack Obama make it to Niagara, so to speak? Will the nuptials take place? Or are we going to get off at Saratoga, for the fourteenth time?

In other words, as poor Adelaide sang,

“Just from worrying if the wedding is on or off
A person can develop a bad, bad cough.

We - that is most human beings living their lives, while the stock markets are crashing - go into this weekend, fearing that the world may be facing a crisis comparable to the Great Crash of 1929, which led to a world-wide recession for several years. Because the stock markets have gone on falling despite what has been done to deal with the financial crisis.

This financial crisis - like that of 1929 - is due to the combination of the volatile stock markets and the influence of the mass media, who magnify what is happening on the stock markets. So people everywhere become fearful, withdrawing their money from the banks. And also by doing nothing. Because of the uncertainties. Not buying new houses. Not buying new cars. So The Guardian today tells me that both of the high priests of American consumer capitalism, General Motors and Ford, are thought to be in danger of going bust!

The facts are that in 1929 America was governed by the Hoover administration, which reacted by looking after the tax-payers’ money. The recession was not stemmed until Franklin Roosevelt took charge in 1932, and pumped government money into the economy.

Three years after the Great Crash.

In the last few weeks governments, including the present administration of George W Bush and the British Labour government and the EC leadership, have shown that they have learnt the lessons of the 1929 crash.

But the stock markets are continuing to plunge. Because the public are fearful. And because, amongst the financiers, with their huge bonuses on top of their salaries, are selling shares short.

They are still trying to make money, out of the current debacle. By speculating in the hope that they can make their fortunes, out of a situation which frightens the average citizen out of their wits.

That is why we are all in for a fearful weekend.

But the reality is that the behaviour of Governments in the last few days, has shown that Governments - and their advisers, who include a lot of people who have studied the reasons for the 1929 Crash - say that our present situation is quite different.

The world is not collapsing. American consumer capitalism is not dead. But it needs continual reform. So that the dreams of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush are not a stable basis for builiding the world of 2008.

The world will only have to wait a few weeks - not three years - to find a viable solution to today’s problems.

On November 4 the US votes for a new President. They can either vote in Barack Obama, who is an admirer of Franklin D Roosevelt. Or they can vote in John McCain, who thinks that his war experience fits him to be President, because some upstart like the President of Iran, or the inheritor of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin, might launch their military might against the US.

Possible.

But not very likely.

The real threat is that stock market panics will push voters to panic as well.

The world, as we know it, is not collapsing.

But it requires clear headedness on the part of our leaders. And an understanding of the economic verities.

And that is where John McCain is woefully inadequate. Barack Obama, although years younger, has read it all in books. And in books written by the scholars of the world.

We are currently facing a PANIC.

Because far too many people have believed in the dreams of Thatcher and Reagan. That we could live a Hollywood dream in which everyone lived happily ever after. If only they worshipped at the shrine of the unregulated free market.

The lesson of the Great Crash of 1929, is that the free market, despite its manifold advantages, needs regulation.

I rest my case.

This is the good news, which should be listened to, against the clamour of the media focus on the collapse of capitalism as we know it.

The banks of the world are bust. Because they have encouraged people to buy what they cannot afford.

Thereby betraying what I was told was the duty of the banker. To tell his client what was prudent, rather than what he might achieve if the dice rolled his way.

The unregulated financial economy, pushed by Thatcher and supported by Reagan, is now seen to be a Hollywood dream.

Now, the banks, and the whole world, is faciing a tomorrow, which may be worse.

At least temporarily.

So throughout the world the banks, in order to survive, had had to rely on governments.

It will take a long time for the economists to come up with a theory to explain this. John Maynard Keynes explained the 1929 crash. But the bankers since then, have discredided him.

They thought that the economy of ever increasing goodies was possible.

But they are now bust.

Surviving with Government money.

Not Thatcherite free enterprise capitalism. But a Democrat New New Deal. And Gordon Brown’s version of New Labour.

At the time of re-writing this the stock markets are still sliding. But come next week maybe they will realise that the present crisis may lead to a better regulated world, in which governments and businessmen work better together to steer us away from boom and bust economics.

Have just finished the first one, Birdsong, written by Sebastian Faulks as far back as 1993,  A long time ago. But, no matter. The issues which it deals with are very much alive now. And it is a great novel. Which has some strong things to say about human beings and the things which drive them.

I knew, before I started reading it, that it was about the first world war, which non-Brits may need to be told, means the war between 1914 and 1918 between the Germans under the Kaiser and the Brits, and assorted allies, including the French and at the last stage the Americans.

The first part, in fact is a love story in the year 1910 between a young Brit and the wife of the French bloke whose hospitality he is enjoying. Veyr erotic. But also believable.

But I felt a bit cheated. Not that I did not enjoy the first section. But i had come to this book to learn more about that war. As i read on i got it. What Birdsong tells about that war deserves to be read by all those who did not experience it.

It is a harrowing story. Which is how i described it to an old friend and neighbour earlier this week. He said: ‘i don’t want to read harrowing novels.’

I knew what he meant. Because I have some of the same feelings. But what i did not say to him - and we are both English - was that the harrowing bits were more than compensated for, by the affirmation of what it is to be a human being. I endured the pain, because the Brit who relates the story endured it, and lived on. No to a ‘happy’ life. But to a life.

Birdsong is a work of the imagination. Sebastian Faulks who wrote it, is younger than me, but he was inspired by members of his family, who knew what it was like in the trenches in 1917.

Faulks’ family was the comfortably off middle class. In first wordl war terms, they were he officier class. But what he writes hones in with my memories of my Uncle Bill, who was there in the trenches in 1917.

Bill was working class. And he never talked about that war in my childhood. He was not, in my youth, a role model for the growing youth. He was a hen-pecked husband, dominated by a strong-minded wife. But he was there during my childhood, because he used to stop home on his way back from work to talk to my mother and her children.

And although he was nearly blind because of the gas of 1917 he lived 25 years longer than his wife and longer than my father and mother. Right up until the time he died I tried to get him to tell me what it was acually like in the trenches in 1917.

He never told me, although. over the years,  I had learnt all the tricks that journalists learn to get people to tell them the facts.

But reading the Faulks novel has given me a glimse of the reality he experienced. Faulks, 90 years after these events happened, hais imagined how it was for the people who inhabited that world.

My Uncle Bill would have said he was spot on.

Enough for tonight. This is a tale of two novels.

Next time, you will hear about the second one.

Just picked this up from the blog of Adrian Monck, the young upstart who is now head of journalism at City University, London. In his blog Monck extracts from an article written by one of the Bradford and Bingley companies written as recently as last May.

It is chilling in its complacency. This is the lot who have just been bailed out by the Government, who have been selling their services to tell people where to put their life savings.

Far be it from me to suggest that readers should trust journalists.

But we are living in an age when Lehmann Brothers have joined the bread line. Which unlike Bradford and Bingley is a firm at the heart of American consumer capitalism.

What the bankers are saying to each other now - in my view rather belatedly - is that the world is facing a crisis, probably the most serious since the 1930s. The minority Republican administration of George W Bush, has survived by pumping money into the US economy, which is Democratic policy, not Republican.

It is now reaping the famine. And governments and bankers around the world are thinking up ways to stop the panic, which can turn a financial crisis into a world-wide depression.

They may get it right. But on the other hand they may not.

The economic thinking which enabled President Franklin Roosevelt to take the US and the world out of the 1930s depression was that of a British economist, John Maynard Keynes who was married to a ballet dancer.

Keynes’ seminal work, was ‘The Economic Consequences of the War’, meaning the First World War.

The voices of today’s economists who have been pointiing to the economic consequences of the Iraq war, have been drowned by the babble of the many economists employed by governments and big business.

Individually, the journalists are quite as untrustworthy as human beings as the bankers and the politicians. But the journalist’s job is to report what those in power are saying, and to compare that with what they said and did in the recent past.

So in today’s conditions we need journalists. As individuals, what they have to say is no better, or worse, than what is said by those who hold the reins of power. But collectively they deserve to be listened to.

The first of the Presidential debates in the US ended in a draw. Although it was supposed to be about Foreign Policy in fact the state of the economy took up quite a lot of the time. Not whether McCain could do better than Obama, if the US was faced with an attack from Putin’s Russia, Iran or the new China or the new North Korea. Which are all possible.

But not very likely.

But the debate reflected the situation in the US where many Americans are in danger of losing their jobs and their homes. And at a time when most of the power players in the world, and particularly China, have learnt how to turn American consumer capitallism to their advantage. And so they will suffer if the US economy collapses.

Just see how many products you buy are made in China?

The voice of the economist tellling us this is drowned in the Babel of our media age. But he must be there somewhere.

And maybe some journalist will find him.

Or her.

Quite suddenly, in the last few weeks, most of the pundits on both sides of the pond, have started to say that what we are facing now is the worst financial crisis since the Great Crash of 1929, which led to world-wide depression lasting five or six years. In which many people in Britain and America had difficulty in finding enough money for basic necessities, let alone tbe products of consumer capitalism.

This time around the crisis has been in the housing market in both countries. Financial institutions have fuelled the dreams of people’s wishes to buy better houses for themselves, and become capitalists themselves by borrowing money to buy houses to let. Now they are in trouble, because they borrowed more money than they could afford.

And now the property market is plunging. Because people are being charged more for mortgages, if they can get them. And at the same time interest rates are being cut. So the banks (if they have not gone bust) are earing more by a widening gap between the rate at which they borrow and the rate at which they lend.

But some ordinary folk are losing their homes and others, who went in for buying to let, are in severe financial difficulty.

‘Ordinary folk’ for the purposes of this blog, includes pretty well everyone in Britain and America who is not super rich. For them, the purchase of a house is a much bigger spend than anything else in their lifetime. However much they know about finance they cannot regard it just as a property investment. They are buying a home, and for many where the home is, and when they have to buy it, is determined by forces quite outside their control.

Currently I am buying a flat in London to replace our rented flat. In the full knowledge that whatever I pay is likely to be more - maybe much more - than what the flat will sell for in the next two or three years. Maybe more than that. But if I hang around I might be dead before the bottom of the market.

Later on tonight, when I am in bed, the first of the television debates between the Obama and McCain will be taking place. Most of the pundits say that what happens in this first debate often determines the result of the election. Today’s debate is supposed to be about foreign policy.

But the pundits are also saying that American voters are more than ever concerned about the economy. Whatever either candidate says tonight will be said against a background of financial markets in chaos. So voters, and viewers all over the world, will be looking for clues about how well each candidate will do when it comes to managing a financial crisis.

Notsomuch as which candidate is tough and experienced enough to stand up to Putin, Iran or South Korea. But which candidate is asute enough to prevent the stock market panic pushing the world into a long recession.

Is an article in Thursday’s Guardian Simon Jenkins asserts that journalists are born not made. His evidence is from his own personal experience. Simon Jenkins makes his living from journalism. Therefore he is a journalist. In his own estimation.

He is paid for voicing his opinions in several media, as well as The Guardian, so he thinks that what he does is journalism.

But writing colums as Jenkins does is not journalism. But merely a part of journalism. What Jenkins writes is mostly worth reading, because he voices his own personal opinions, which are derirved from a serious analysis of today’s problems.

Which is his forte.

But that is not journalism.

At which Jenkins was a miserable failure, as the editor of the Evening Standard and as the editor of The Times.

His columns, deriving from his own personal view of the world, are frequently illuminating. And thank God that the mainstream newspapers (The Sunday Times as well as The Guardian and the BBC) are stil prepared to pay him to write them.

But journalism is about reporting the facts, not telling people what the journalist thinks about the facts.

Simon Jenkins was born not made.

But journalistis need to be made. They need to learn that their job is not to tell the world what to do. But to report what is actually happening.

In my last blog, Brown and out, written as recently as Saturday, I said Labour needed a new leader to have any hope of winning the next election. Today I have to report that the only new leader to emerge at the Labour Party conference in Manchester was a radically changed Gordon Brown. As the political correspondents in the conference hall wrote in today’s newspapers, he did not make a great speech. They rated it good. I rated it very good. When I read the speech in full on the BBC web site. Which was not the impression I got when saw the main BBC News last night, which gave a few sound bites and a lot of commentary.

The most widely quoted sound bite, was when Brown said, that although he was in favour of apprenticeship, this was ‘no time for a novice’ to run the country. In one blow he managed to finger his two main rivals, the youthful David Cameron, who has piloted the Conservative Party to a 20 per cent leader in the polls. And the even more youthful David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, who has been processing around Manchester, professing loyalty to the Prime Minister, but making speeches that leave no doubt in anyone’s mind, that he sees himself as the leader in waiting.

This double-edged barb did far more damage to Miliband than it did to Cameron. Because the television cameras panned to him looking like a giggly callow youth, as the picture here, taken from the BBC web site, demonstrates. And because Miliband had demonstrated during the conference week that he could be just as clumsy as his boss, famous for his ‘clunking fist’ style.

Miliband made some unguarded comments in a lift full of political correspondents including the man from BBC. This how the BBC reported it:

He paid tribute to Mr Brown in his speech but aides were heard telling him it was being given “six out of ten”.

A BBC journalist heard him reply: “I couldn’t have gone any further. It would have been a Heseltine moment.”

As several political journalists pointed out in today’s papers, Michael Heseltine had left the Conservative cabinet before he attacked Margaret Thatcher in his own quite open bid to become leader himself. Miliband is trying to have it both ways, by remaining in the cabinet, declaring his loyalty, while at the same time, making it obvious to all but his advisers, that he is trying to stab him in the back. Witness his article in The Guardian a few weeks ago. And his behaviour this week.

But back to the speeches. Here is a link to Miliband’s main conference speech. See if you can find some substance in it.

By contrast Brown’s speech was full of substance. He talked sense about the chaos in the financial markets and the impending serious recession. He demonstrated his commitment to competition, the free market and private enterprise, continuing the Blairite New Labour policies. But he also stressed the need for government intervention to correct the excesses of the market, and pleadged new measures to help the poor and vulnerable including the growing army of pensioners.

He was rightly criticised in the first year of his premiership for indecisiveness. In this speech he clarity and decisiveness. He offered a clear alternative to Cameron’s New Conservatism. If he continues this way, Britain, like the Americans, will have a clear choice in the next election.

In the last few months I have written several critical blogs about Brown. I don’t regret them. But I do admit I was wrong to write him off. I think he has been changed, by the experience of power and by the tumultuous events of the last few weeks.  From it - to judge by this speech - what is emerging is a new vision. Not the old Labour of Roy Hattersley, Clem Attlee, Nye Bevan and Keir Hardie, but a new new Labour, which seeks to mesh traditional Labour values with the realities of a global economy.

This is only one speech. But a very good one. And the least you can say is that the clunking fist has learnt how to use a stiletto. And the content of the speech demonstrates that although David Miliband looks much more like Barack Obama, that it is Gordon Brown who is articulating policies and a vision that are in tune with the new American Democrats around Obama.

I may have used this headline before. No matter.

Gordon Brown, who stems from Old Labour roots, has since he became Prime Minister, been more Blairite than Tony Blair himself, in allying himself with George W Bush’s America.

In the last few days he has switched around, after reading in the ‘capitalist press’ about the collapse of American consumer capitalism.

He is now switching back to his former agenda of Old Labour, because the Labour vote in the polls has been wiped out by the new MacMilianism of David Cameron. His chances of winning Labour votes are slight. His chances of winning the votes of people who are not Labour are nil.

He is yesterday’s man.

Labour needs a new leader if it is not going to be wiped out in the new election.

It needs someone who is more in tune with with the world as it is, after Bair and after Brown, and, equally important, after George W Bush, who will go back to his ranch on November 4 next.

The time has come for Gordon Brown to join Roy Hattersley in the House of Lords. And to continue to make a contribution by writing for the newspapers.

Will he choose to write for the Murdoch press. (His style is more The Times than The Sun.) or will he compete for a space on The Guardian opinion pages?

Who knows.

But Labour in Manchester needs to be picking a new leader who can have some hope of producing a halfway decent performance in the next election.