August offers just a brief respite for the beleaguered tenure of Gordon Brown, writes Frank Millar.
BRITISH FOREIGN secretary David Miliband maintains he is campaigning for nothing more than the success of the Labour government. But we may rest assured that Gordon Brown will be mightily relieved that the Milibandwagon has been parked while his cabinet colleague takes his family on a sunshine holiday. For with friends like Miliband we may be about to discover just how many enemies the beleaguered prime minister has amassed inside the Labour ranks.
At first glance Miliband's now-famous article in Tuesday's Guardianomitting any reference to the prime minister might have looked like his very own Michael Portillo moment. That was in 1995 when a troubled John Major forced a leadership contest in a desperate "back me or sack me" challenge to his Tory tormentors. Friends of cabinet minister Portillo, then the darling of the Thatcherite right, were found to have had telephone lines installed in the putative headquarters of a leadership challenge that failed to materialise. Though there were many factors in the subsequent undoing of Portillo's leadership ambitions, many would cite this as the failure of nerve from which he never recovered.
On Wednesday, likewise, hostile briefings from in and around 10 Downing Street depicted "Brains" Miliband as "self-serving" and "disloyal", an ambitious upstart who had allowed ego to cloud his judgment. "If he hasn't enough to occupy him as foreign secretary perhaps he should be given another job," was the tenor of one barely-coded call for his demotion if not dismissal.
It seems Number 10 decided to let Miliband use a scheduled press conference on Wednesday to deliver the ringing endorsement of the prime minister so conspicuously missing from the article. Whitehall insiders agreed this was the only logical explanation for permitting the press conference to proceed.
Events showed that Downing Street had miscalculated - for retreat came there none. True, Miliband spent a long time dancing on the head of a pin, insisting his challenge was actually to Conservative leader David Cameron. But the nearest he got to a loyalty pledge was when he declared: "Can Gordon lead us into the next election and win? Yes, I'm absolutely confident about that." Note that failure to say the leader elected unopposed just over a year ago "would" or "should" do so. And why - "Can Gordon ...?" - admit to any doubt at all amid a media frenzy predicting an autumn coup? On occasion Miliband appeared frustrated by the persistent questioning. After all, he protested (mildly), he had consistently said he would not stand against Brown last time and nobody had believed him. Few would believe him now, especially in the light of his reply to the simple question - "would the Labour Party be mad to ditch the prime minister before the general election?" As "a loyal member", the foreign secretary could only say "the Labour Party never does mad things." It was hardly beyond the Oxford-educated son of a Marxist intellectual to work out that the "loyal" answer required was that Labour would indeed be mad to do so. Nor did it require the fine legal skills of serial rebel MP Bob Marshall-Andrews to grasp that Miliband understood the "code" in setting out his stall by way of an article "saying one thing and meaning another".
"It's game on," ventured one experienced Blairite after listening to Miliband. And again, on Thursday, during a long interview on the BBC's Jeremy Vine programme, Miliband did nothing to correct the original interpretation of his game-plan. Far from it, as he jokingly assured listeners these were not family members on the call-in line urging him, as did one woman called Mandy, to "get that God-awful man Brown out". By this point it was difficult not to agree that the foreign secretary had seriously crossed the line and that failure to sack him would compound the prime minister's reputation for indecision.
Whatever happens in the coming weeks, the point is that this did not become a crisis of Brown's authority by accident. The evidence was there in the original article, few surely doubting whom Miliband had in mind with his warning that voters "switch off" when they hear "exaggerated claims, either about failure or success". Likewise his suggestion that Labour needed to be "more humble" about its shortcomings while "more compelling" about its achievements.
"New Labour (that would be under Tony Blair ...) won three elections by offering real change, not just in policy but in the way we do our politics," Miliband wrote. "So let's stop feeling sorry for ourselves, enjoy a break, and then find the confidence to make our case afresh." Ouch.
The even more compelling evidence, perhaps, lies in the denials that were not forthcoming in the light of the Guardian'sreportage of the Miliband prospectus for Labour revival. The newspaper had no doubt this could be read "as an implicit criticism of the current leadership's political style".
While Miliband offered "no overt disloyalty", neither was he suggesting Brown was "the only figure" capable of taking the party through difficult economic times. Rather, Miliband's "willingness to write so confidently" would be seen "as a reminder to a demoralised party that there are figures in the cabinet capable of making a compelling analysis of Labour's political challenges".
As Andrew Pierce sharply divined in the Daily Telegraph, the real challenge here was to "Blairite outriders" like former ministers Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn to stop the whispering campaigns and finally take courage "to unite to overturn Brown". Their courage may yet fail them. But we should not have long to wait to find out. For those of us still to take a holiday, this August promises to be a wickedly short month.
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Frank Millar is London Editor of The Irish Times