Why Broon's Doomed

Gordon Brown’s first week in power seems to have been received well. He and his new Home Secretary have managed to sound responsible and dignified in the face of the world’s most comically useless terrorist attacks. Labour partisans in the commentariat are overjoyed to witness Brown’s ability to move next door and not tread on any banana skins en route. The opposition is being civilised, partly out of the sense of statesmanship necessary in weeks like this, and partly to keep their powder dry.

But despite his good week, the prospects for Brown’s premiership are not good. Even before his frankly rather pathetic debut at PMQs, it was plain that Brown would be the first new Prime Minister for a long time whose opponents would greet him not with venom, but with contempt. Most incoming PMs are met with a healthy mixture of cheers and loathing. On either side there is both hope and anger, but always there’s passion. If a new leader can’t inspire even some sincere hatred, they’re in trouble.

This kind of quiet, indifferent contempt is rare, reserved for those new boys whom the voters already know all about, and don’t think much of. It is the worst of receptions. Matthew Parris, the exceptionally shrewd columnist for The Times, has written of his desire to join those who are accused of underestimating Gordon Brown, and who think that his talents have been wildly oversold. Brilliant at sums, but with no imagination and less courage, goes the Parris line.

For the past decade, Gordon Brown has been portrayed as the grim but brainy force behind the glossy charm of Tony Blair. Allies boast of the great man’s intellectual power, his grasp of detail and his vast reading. We are reminded that Brown is the first truly intellectual Prime Minister since Balfour. No doubt that is true, as far as it goes. But succeeding at the top of politics is not just a matter of IQ, and two factors have already doomed Brown’s spell at the top.

In a modern, media-driven democracy, top politicians are overexposed. Being an active, thrusting politician is synonymous with ‘being on TV all the time’. A politician who’s made it to the top has usually gone through several years of obscurity to all except Westminster-watchers, followed by a period of rising stardom, in which their public profile slowly grows, after which the they break through to the top stratum of politics.

Once they reach this point, politicians are ceaselessly in the public eye. Unlike politicians of previous generations, Westminster’s modern top dogs have a limited lifespan. Constantly gossiped about, analysed and featured in the press, and trailed by camera crews as they visit schools, clean up graffiti and do the other textbook stunts, we can only take so much of them. If the Victorian public had had to watch Gladstone cleaning up dog mess with a cheery grin on his face, he wouldn’t have still been at No. 10 in his eighties.

The life expectancy of a modern top politician is no more than ten to fifteen years, before we are utterly sick of the sight of him. At this point, the nation generally likes to kick them out, despise their memory for a few years, before their slow rehabilitation into loveable old curmudgeons, in the mould of Lord ‘Tub of Lard’ Hattersley.

Even before reaching No. 10, Gordon Brown had used up most of his political lifespan. He has loomed over the political landscape for a decade, a constant presence in the nation’s life. While he’s been much less obviously a media presence than Blair, and his public appearances have been mainly limited to formal events and a few stiff photocalls, his presence in the nation’s consciousness has been no less real.

He has dictated much of domestic policy since 1997. He has steered the government in the direction of a more wide-ranging state, one that looks after and helps raise small children, as well as try to educate them when they’re older. The domestic policies that the government’s most wholeheartedly committed itself to - like tax credits - are Gordon’s. He has loudly taken the credit for virtually everything that’s gone well in this country since 1997. And his sullen, under-the-table bickering with Tony Blair has kept the national’s political journalists amused for just as long.

It is absurd to think that he comes to No. 10 as a fresh talent. He has at most, one full Parliament left before his time is exhausted. No one could, hand on heart, say that they can visualise Gordon Brown still being Prime Minister in ten years’ time. He is already on the way out, whatever he tries to do. His only struggle now is to make it a slow exit.

The second problem for him is that his decade of sulking has already marked him out as a second-rate PM. If you think of the great Prime Ministers, they were all people who took chances when offered, made the most of them, and forced their own success upon the system. Propelling yourself to the top through your own political skill and courage earns respect of the most Machiavellian kind, the kind that gives you the power to mould politics to your agenda.

Whereas those leaders who inherit the job without a fight, perhaps as a reward for long service, as the nominee of a more powerful figure, or because no one could think of anyone better, are always going to make mediocre leaders. They are people like Jim Callaghan, Anthony Eden, and John Major. David Davis, if he had won the Tory race, would have been one.

Inheriting power without a fight, they start at an inevitable disadvantage. They haven’t earned that brutal, wolf-pack sense of respect for a leader who’s proved him or herself to be the strongest, sharpest and most ruthless. Westminster politics is not cuddly. Blair used all the Machiavellian tricks that exist - other than the one about leaving the body of his unpopular lieutenant in two pieces in the piazza - to keep power from slipping away from him. It gives a leader a sense of invincibility, quite necessary if he or she is going to keep dozens of the most ambition and cunning people in the country from besting him.

For all his superficial fluffiness, Cameron did prove himself in his leadership fight, coming from behind and beating the favourite hands-down. Brown, in contrast, was outmanoeuvred in 1994, sold a deal at Granita that proved worthless, and never managed to fight back. He waited nearly ten years, sulking and briefing in the background, until Blair was terminally weakened. Then, last September, he struck, with a timid, half-hearted attempt at a coup. Its success can be measured by the fact that even against a weakened Blair, Brown was forced to wait yet another year to gain his prize.

Brown starts his premiership with his time running out, and weakened by his own timidity. For ten years he has been the prime minister-in-waiting, and he has excelled only at the waiting. His chance to be a great PM evaporated ten years ago, when he rolled over and let Blair win without a fight. In the dog-eat-dog world of Westminster, it’s too late to recover. Only natural, therefore, that even Brown’s enemies should greet him with a contemptuous shrug.