Jonathan Todd

The Sunday Mail reports that support for Labour has fallen to 23 percent – the lowest since opinion polls began in 1943. If Labour polled this badly at a general election, the party would lose 200 seats to the Conservatives, who would hold a massive, carte blanche majority of 220. The survey was also the first to record that the majority of voters want Gordon Brown to stand down now as PM.

These are desperate times, indeed, for Labour and while the expenses revelations “will hurt the reputation of all politicians”, argues Andrew Rawnsley, ”the damage is likeliest to be greatest to Labour at the next election”. Another poll supports Rawnsley’s view. There have been many highs and lows under PM Brown. But each low seems lower and more desperate than the last one. I didn’t think it was possible to go any lower than the McBride affair but recent days have probably managed it.

It may be that everything that has been revealed in recent days was “within the rules”. What McBride was up to certainly was not. Nonetheless, Brown’s response in both cases was to blame the rules and insist upon their reform. But people, especially public figures, have to take responsibility for their actions, irrespective of what the rules may or may not say. While the McBride affair was undoubtedly depressing in the extreme, there is something even more depressing about the expenses revelations because the people concerned are people who are widely respected and admired within the Labour Party, in contrast to McBride.

Of course, as I have heard Tessa Jowell and Ed Miliband say on TV, we should avoid making judgements on the basis of partial information and Ben Bradshaw and Phil Woolas also challenge the versions of events that have been reported about them. I am afraid, however, that, whatever the reality of the situation may prove to be, the damage has already been done and the dye has been cast for Labour. The party can now only, to mix metaphors, walk into the hurricane of public anger.    

What a prospect. It must make the most battle hardened Labour campaigner nervous about door knocking. Those lions have been lead to this by the expenses claims of the donkeys that lead them. Alan Johnson, however, doesn’t appear quite so donkey like. According to Rawnsley, he, along with Hilary Benn and Ed Miliband emerges ”as acmes of frugality who make modest and entirely reasonable claims for performing their duties”.

James Forsyth argues that this increases the likeihood of Miliband “winning the leadership after the next election”. But the question will increasingly be asked whether, if this were to happen, this would make him the next leader of the Labour Party. Even before the expenses story broke The Mirror did not seem disinclined to the prospect of the frugal Johnson, who has recently appeared to indicate more of willingness to take on the top job than previously, replacing Brown before the election. That frugality must have been good for his conscience at the time and now also appears a smart career move.

 Matthew D’Ancona speculates that he ”may yet be the first person to become Labour leader by going on television and radio repeatedly to deny that he is either capable of the job or interested in it”. These denials mean that Johnson is considered to lack a steely, Michael Heseltine or Brown like determination to accede to the very top. Given this and past experience – the lack of any challenge to Brown either when he became leader or last summer – D’Ancona seems justified in his view that “for all the sound and fury we can expect over the summer”, in terms of plots against Brown, ”the PM will still survive and fight the general election”. But D’Ancona was writing prior to the expenses story. Is this story a game changer? And, if so, how will the game end?

Martin Bright is right think to that there is a “distinct possibility that (it may end with) the Labour Party (going) into terminal decline as a credible political force”. He argues that the best way to avert that outcome is for “the younger generation of Labour politicians … to take control now”. Who can he have in mind? I don’t think Johnson or Harriet Harman, another potential successor to Brown, can be considered part of the younger generation. But James Purnell and Jon Cruddas could. Allegra Stratton has them down as a ‘dream ticket’.

“Why don’t James and Jon grow some balls and get together and challenge GB”, a “Labour grandee” apparently recently told her. The “grandee” will presumably hope that the expenses story has made these balls grow. At this stage, however, I am not sure whether it is certain that Purnell, nor Ed Balls or Yvette Cooper, either of whom (but surely not both?) might well consider standing in any contest that featured Purnell, is out of the expenses wood - though, this is far from the only question that might be raised about the supposed dream ticket. They are usually considered, for one thing, to be on opposing wings of the party. David Miliband – another member of the younger generation with leadership ambitions – certainly hasn’t come out of the expenses story as well as his brother or Johnson.    

If Brown can be prised from Downing Street – and that definitely remains a big if – then the number of names discussed here (Johnson, Harman, Purnell, Cruddas, Balls, Cooper and both Milibands) would seem to open up the spectre of an unseemly scramble for Number 10 – if they all were to grow balls, as it were - at a time when we face challenges so grave that Frank Field has been talking about the need for a national unity government. Peter Mandelson may insist that Brown is focused on these challenges, not his cleaner, but polls of 23 percent cannot fail to darken Labour’s mood music. It may now be the Tories turn to hold the expenses spotlight but David Cameron senses enough weakness around Brown to be edging towards a confidence vote, via the Royal Mail vote.

The chances are that Brown will avoid a confidence vote by giving enough concessions to Labour backbenchers to win the Royal Mail vote with Labour votes, while losing Cameron’s support for his Royal Mail plans. But how many concessions can Brown give without losing the support of the responsible Minister, Mandelson, a potential Geoffrey Howe in this drama if ever there was one? It’s bizarre that Brown has ended up in a position of such dependence upon his old foe – The Sunday Telegraph speculates that Brown may reduce this dependence, in respect of the Royal Mail vote at least, by moving Mandelson to the Foreign Office, “a post he has long coveted”. How these once bitter rivals play their cards on the Royal Mail vote may go some way to determining whether everyone’s favourite ex-postie, Johnson, ends up as PM. The Sunday Telegraph also suggests that Brown may try to prevent this happening by making Johnson Chancellor and, thus, “binding him in” to Brown. This creates the risk, however, as Peter Hoskin notes, that Alistair Darling will play Howe.

All of this, however, is just fluff and hot air – or “sound and fury” to use D’Ancona’s term. Not only is it fluff and hot air, it is fluff and hot air at a time of crisis. Shuffling deckchairs on the Titantic is the right expression. Martin Bright correctly grasps the depth of the crisis facing Labour. The worst thing Labour could offer now (and I have stopped assuming that things can’t get any more desperate, as that assumption has proved sadly, too unrealistic) is more fluff and hot air. That is to say more talk of a challenge to Brown. Talking about challenging Brown but not actually challenging Brown, i.e. not growing balls but pretending to, is the worst of all Labour worlds. It is worse than growing balls and challenging Brown. It is also worse than not growing balls and supporting Brown.

This is a crisis of fluff and hot air in a deeper and more dangerous sense than this, however. Brown promised the country a vision but, frankly, this only came into view with the credit crunch. This gave his government a sense of purpose that it otherwise lacked. Once a government and a party becomes so lacking in purpose that it needs a global crisis to give it one, it is little surprise that the public have little sense of what the party’s purposes, motivations and convictions really amount to. I fear that those battle hardened Labour campaigners, who are newly nervous about door knocking, would struggle to give a convincing answer as to what the point of a fourth Labour term would be, if asked on the doorstep. These lions have again been let down by the donkeys that lead them. And just as badly let down as they have been in respect of expenses.

The Labour Party, whoever leads it, desperately needs a stronger sense of direction. Until the party rediscovers, re-imagines and revivifies its purposes, it cannot complain about these purposes being unclear to the electorate. The most encouraging thing about the latest ‘date‘ between the ‘dream ticket’ is that it occurred at the launch of an exciting new Demos pamphlet. The Liberal Republic is a great publication by Richard Reeves and Phil Collins, which is likely to appeal to Alan Milburn, a name sure to be mentioned among the plotters. The likes of Milburn, Purnell and Cruddas are intelligent and bright enough to think through the thoughts that will need to be thought through for Labour to really rediscover its sense of direction. They should have the balls to do so and not to get distracted by the fluff and hot air. Only one of these pursuits, ultimately, will make a real difference. We were promised vision and we were promised substance. That is still what is required, whoever leads Labour.