Fixed Term Parliaments have been shelved for a long time now; it was Labour Policy in 1992, but since they didn’t win nothing came of it. The Lib Dems have held on to it for a long time now, but since they’ll never win, nothing will ever come from it. The Tories aren’t really quite sure whether to be in a conservative mood or their “change” mood.

If the date of a General Election is fixed well in advance, we can certainly expect to see an increase of widgets like this:

Though at least they won’t be quite so arrogantly presumptuous as to second guess the Prime Minister, at least this one doesn’t say “countdown to victory” or suchlike.

I would expect the Conservatives to rather like the current system, since they have played it so well. In Opposition, they used the “Snap Election” card to its breaking point. Cameron asking Brown “Can we have an election? When can we have an election? I want an election! Muuuuuuuuuuum!” every week for about three months in Prime Ministers’ Questions came off well for him.

The real advantages to introducing a fixed term parliament in Britain seem negligible. On the part of the electorate, the advantage is little more than psychological as it takes power away from the Executive (and gives it to the Administrative); the flipside is that by taking this power away, the Prime Minister no longer has to take the make-or-break decision.

This puts a stop to the grandstanding and the bluffing over wanting an election and completely removes the debate away from “personal mandates” and other nonsense that people come up with because they don’t understand the difference between a Prime Minister and a President.

It also means the Prime Minister will no longer need to go to the Monarch and ask for her permission to hold a general election, thus removing the Monarchy even further from politics and eroding its case for existence in the 21st century.

With the “PM decides” model, the incumbent has the advantage of being able to call an election when it suits them; they also have the disadvantage of being in government, so logically they really are just trying to pick the least unfavourable date.

There have also been accusations in past elections of releasing a ‘favourable’ budget just before an election, with Fixed Term Parliaments the same practice will go on, it will just be a little bit more obvious.

With Fixed Terms, potentially a government can hold out on the people for three years and then come out all guns blazing in year four. Whether voters have short or long memories is a different debate but my inclination is definitely towards the goldfish end of the scale.

Having criticised Gordon Brown not so long ago over his handling of the British economy, President Sarkozy decided to follow suit an implement his own temporary tax cut. Neoliberal Sarko is now nowhere to be found, but then again, it IS Sarkozy we are talking about, continuity was never a strong point.

Here a few ministers (looking pretty smug, it has to be said) gather around for their first coffee at a lower price, including the Mayor of Nice and Minister for Industry, Christian Estrosi (Boo, hiss!) sitting second from left.

The cut seems to be widely welcomed, and comes as a welcome relief to Nicois restaurants (and me in particular) who are quite keen to be able to lower their prices.

However, some establishments won’t be lowering their prices but instead will be using the tax relief to raise wages.

I haven’t seen any directing from the government on which approach is preferable, Brown was quite keen for businesses to pass on the cut to the consumer, though with unemployment as serious as it is in France, I won’t complain against wage rises.

This was a mistake in my opinion, as I wrote on LabourList, but although I didn’t get my way, at least I generated 65 comments worth of debate. Half-decent debate too, not just YouTube “U r gay”.

I’m deeply concerned about dark forces moving within the cabinet, by which I mean Peter “Prince of Darkness” Mandelson, getting titles like “First Secretary of State without a proper brief (I.e. John Prescott was Deputy Prime Minister, so it made sense for him to have it.) It’s a very Vladimir Putin thing to do, secret bogus titles…

I could go into great detail, but this morning’s cartoons in the newspapers capture it perfectly.

A picture saves me writing 1000 words.

Peter Brookes from The Times

Then on Brown’s position (the perfect representation of my analysis):

Garland from the Telegraph

Dave Brown from the Independent

And finally, I watching Prime Minister’s Questions, live for the first time in… ever.

The Twitterati and Facebookers were the first to console themselves with the notion that the BNP actually had fewer votes than in 2004, and that the result was mainly due to Labour’s collapse. Personally, my response:

“I hereby take responsibility for the election of 2 BNP MEPs and apologise without reserve on behalf of the Labour Party.”

Don’t blame the electoral system, don’t blame the recession, don’t blame it on being in power for so long, don’t blame the turnout and definitely don’t blame “local reasons”. The responsibility for the result rests squarely with us.

By ‘us’ though, I really mean ‘the Labour leadership’. I know that there are so many Labour activists, myself included, who have been swimming against the current as everything we say falls on deaf ears. Conversations on the doorstep were inevitably about expenses and leadership, never about Europe.

Therein lays the problem. The negative attention directed at Labour and specifically Brown will not go away until he does. If he does not go now, another bad event will spark up more calls for him to go. Every issue and event will be seen through the prism of Brown’s weak position, opening up barely sealed wounds. The only way to stop the debate about the leadership is to push the red button.

If he does not do “the honourable thing” then he will have to be kicked out violently, lest the public do the same to the entire party. A war on all fronts, from the backbenchers to the Blairites to the Cabinet is the only way forward. The arguments against removing Brown no longer have weight; the equation has changed and unless we show the public a serious and powerful gesture, Labour will go down with him. As Frank Field rightly points out:

“Labour supporters claiming that the European results were not a catastrophe for the party can only do so by inventing a new meaning for the word catastrophe.”

There are some who say than in every crisis there is an opportunity. With Brown, in every crisis there is an even bigger crisis, and in every opportunity there is a crisis with the opportunity for another crisis.

When it comes to problems for Labour, obviously Gordon Brown is only the tip of the iceberg. However, by getting rid of the tip, the public will no longer see the rest of the iceberg, and at least the net quantity of iceberg will have gone down a little bit.

Short of stepping down, it seems to be that the Prime Minister knows that the game is up, and has shifted into “Legacy Mode”. By painting himself as “the best man for the job” to deal with the economy, he has also remembered how he wanted to tinker with the Constitution. I had heard that he had also hoped to push through the Lisbon Treaty as well. It looked for a while that he was trying to gives his old friends that last leg-up to give his heirs more credibility. Trying to put Balls as Chancellor was a clear example.

Tragically, his legacy will be little more than the man who did worse than Michael Foot. Of course he has made an enormous contribution to the Labour Party, but he is also the man who has done an equal amount of damage to it. If he really is “the best we have”, the Cabinet Ministers should hang their heads in shame. It is hard to imagine anyone being worse than him without deliberately trying to sabotage the party. To allow Brown to stay now is to destroy 100 years of political history for the sake of one man’s ego.

The other favourite argument of the “loyalists” (to Brown, not the Party) is that there is no consensus behind who should replace him. I think we will have cross that bridge when we come to it, unless Brown has already burned it down. We are in an untenable position now and the only way to improve our fortunes, not just in the next General Election but in the future of British politics, is to change this position. A big leap into popularity may be impossible from where we currently stand, but changing something, anything, will be a step in the right direction.

This is not the end of our trouble, but if we want to live to fight another day this is the only way.

The broadcast was 2:40 of pure negative embarrassment. It is an obviously testing time for many Labour activists and with every punch the man in the video laid on that punch bag, it felt like one more blow to my self-respect as a Labour member. David Cameron would do X, David Cameron would do Y. Well what are we going to do? Yes, the broadcast may have been factual; yes, these things need to be said, but Labour comes across as a bully, scaremongering the electorate into voting for it. Maybe I’m a romantic, but I would prefer to ask people to vote out of support for us rather than fear of the opposition.

Before I go on to talk about the Party at large, I want to talk more specifically about this broadcast. Not only was it a more despicable campaign than the one in Crewe & Nantwich, it was also poorly executed. The people who made this video need hurling into the boardroom for a right ticking off from Sir Alan. Given a camera and a tenner, I would have produced a better PPB, and made a tenner. I’m no spin doctor, but I know that the first 30 seconds of a PPB should not be some mystery bloke walking up to a punch bag, and it shouldn’t continue for a cumulative minute throughout. “Where’s yer bloody product?”

Contrast this with, say, the Green Party broadcast: It was interesting, simple, and coherent, struck the right tone, dealt with misconceptions while also promoting their policy, with a decent dose of humour too. Contrast our broadcast with that of the Welsh Labour Party too, which was all-in-all a good PPB because it used the platform to promote the program. Rhodri Morgan talking about people “not getting paid to sit at home, but getting paid to train three days a week and work the other two” is exactly the kind of message we as Labourites should be sending all across the country. He even mentioned the word “Europe”.

“Europe” brings me neatly to the Conservative Broadcast. Too bad for us, it was a stroke of genius and Cameron killed two birds with one stone. He realised that nobody really cares about the European Elections, which is symptomatic of how little priority all the parties have given their MEPs, none of whom feature in our broadcast to talk about what they’ve been up to. He realised that voters want to sort out MPs’ expenses. Cameron confronted this immediately, and on top of that, he managed to avoid alienating half of his party by steering well clear of Europe. (UKIP’s PPB, while giving the impression of a daytime TV accident helpline advert, at least stated their case).

Controversially, offence is the best form of defence. We don’t need to focus on defending record in government which should speak for itself; we do need to show a way for the future. This is not to say that the two are mutually exclusive, but there is now a Blairite Generation of first-time voters (myself included) who don’t remember first hand how bad the Tories were, and there are even more (myself not included) who don’t even care.

Negative campaigning is both necessary and effective, but it won’t work for us in this situation. Labour is deeply unpopular by itself, so it’s up to us to sort it out, though when I say “us” here, I mean of course “them”, the people like “Gordon”, “Harriet” and “Ed” who keep emailing me to tell me everything is fine and that we’re actually 20 points ahead, it’s just that the newspapers (boo hiss) are bitter, and the PM is actually brilliant, oh and it’s America’s fault too.

There’s an argument I’ve heard around the Internet that “you just can’t attack Cameron” because he is genuinely liked. You’re much better off attacking the run-of-the-mill moat-owning Tory. This is true for the moment, but I believe it may be more effective to paint Cameron neither as a “shallow salesman” nor as “chief economic adviser to the Treasury on Black” when he was apparently little more than an intern. It’s my understanding that he was Michael Howard’s right hand man and chief speechwriter. He’s the Sorcerer’s Apprentice who wrote some of the worst kind of Tory anti-immigration scaremongering. You need a mix of positive and negative stuff.

I do blame Brown for the weakness of the Cabinet and of the Party. For a decade, the government was distracted by his ego, as he as his “Brownites” crushed and pushed any potential rival out of the way and blocked reform at any opportunity. It is for this reason Tony Blair hesitated to promote David Miliband, as much as we say “Brown’s Budget” instead of Alastair Darling’s, why Alan Milburn was sent to the back, and why Blunkett and Clarke had their trigger fingers ready. Dominated by Brown’s “flawed” personality, the legislative program has come to a complete halt.

Unfortunately, Labour’s interests are currently no longer compatible with those of the nation. Of course it is in the interest of the country to have a Labour government (not matter how bad Brown is, I can’t believe that Cameron will be better), but it is not in the Party’s interests to be in government. We need to finish modernising; there will be former Labour activists, who left because of Blair and Iraq and so forth, who have been waiting on the sidelines with their watches out waiting to pronounce the time-of-death of New Labour. This is no time to “go back” to Old Labour, as we so desperately need to go forward. The Old/New Labour divide remains a scar on the party that has to be overcome the PLP has to get over labels, whether they be Blairites, Brownites, Brownies, Harmen, or Milibandistas.

We’re going to get hammered on June 4th (though I’ll still be working faithfully in Regional Office up to polling day). By coincidence, so will our friends in the French Parti Socialiste, who have also had their fair share of leadership issues. They, however, have the advantage of Opposition. It is lamentable that when the world needs a credible centre-left ideology in the wake of an unprecedented economic crisis, Social Democrats across Europe have been caught unawares, despite the relative success of Zapatero’s PSOE; we have heard strangely little from him.

The impression I get from various people is that we are somehow repeating history. We might be in for a circa 1997 landslide, it might be a new Thatcher ‘83. High-up Labour figures suggest that we’re actually back in 1992. None of these seem very appealing to me, for if by some miracle we were to win the next General Election, without a battle plan in “the fight for Britain’s future” it might be better to cut our losses before it gets so bad we’re out for another 18 years. We have to reunite, rethink and be ready to return in four years time.

Article after article on LabourList, I see saccharin phrases like “if we get rid of Brown, that’s just what the Tories want” as if the Tories don’t want a worn out Labour leader who is politically inept, nationally despised and who can’t flash a decent smile. There will be people who will call me a “defeatist” or a “fatalist”; in return I’ll call them “complacent” and “foolish”. I can’t remember where I read it, either LabourList or LabourHome, but the fact we’ve fallen below 30% (20% on some polls) means that even the ‘core vote’ is deserting us. There is no hope that, unlike what the emails tell us, the Tories will come unstuck over policy, because they are not going to face any scrutiny while everyone watches Labour stumble behind from disaster to disaster. The party is at its lowest rating ever and ministers need to get their act together.

Political geography favours Gordon Brown. If both major parties were to perform equally well at the election, Labour would still wins 80 more seats than the Tories. This means that David Cameron would have to win another two million votes to earn the same number of seats. To break even, the Tories require a 6% lead, and an even bigger 10% per cent to earn an overall working majority. This seems like a walkover considering the current double figure lead the Conservatives have at the moment, until you learn the history lesson that every government from the mid-50s to mid-90s that suffered difficulties half-way through the term enjoyed a significant poll recovery. It is highly likely that the Government will close the gap to avoid a wipeout, and there is enough time to tighten the race and prevent a 10-point lead, and perhaps catch-up enough to rob Cameron of the 6% benchmark

Although the label has been applied in many cases, Gordon Brown is not John Major. In the Crewe and Nantwich byelection, Labour lost 40% of its vote. Combined with the same result in Glasgow East, this seems devastating, and foreboding of things to come. That is, until it is compared to the Dudley West byelection in 1994, where the Conservative vote collapsed by a spectacular 80%.

Labour woes are fundamentally different, as Gordon Brown has been a fashionable scapegoat over the past year. The YouGov polling boss, Peter Kellner, presents research that shows that having dealt with floods and other horsemen (whose horses had foot-and-mouth or bluetongue), voters do not blame Brown for obviously international issues like rising food and fuel prices, but still want help from the government. So while the credit crunch is global, current economic problems contrast hugely with Black Wednesday, which was a fully-patented Tory disaster. It marked the beginning of the end for John Major, but Gordon Brown is in a very different position.

The double-figure Tory poll lead is incredibly overrated. All the hype about a landslide of Blairesque proportions is ridiculous as in 1995 and 1996 (the same sort of mid-term time scale befroe the election) Tony Blair earned extraordinary approval ratings which hit 70%. Factor in Cameron’s ratings, which occaisionaly stuggle 50%, and the scale of defeat fizzles out. It seems that while the Leader of the Opposition appears likeable, compassionate and competent, he is exposed as lightweight, shallow and very out-of-touch.

As Cameron is a poor impression of Tony Blair, he cannot win an election by himself. The Old School Tories of yesterdecade still frighten voters who can remember them (as a generation have grown up under Labour, which may explain why Brown’s history lessons of “15% interest rates” and “3 million unemployed” fail to resonate with everyone). Nevertheless, the Tory Party still appears unchanged and Tories still appear as untrustworthy crypto-thatcherites. Unfortunately for Cameron, he cannot even command a successful gagging order on his team, as Micheal Gove released plans to privatise education and the farcical David Davis byelection.

Essentially, the facts point to Brown winning, barely, though probably losing his majority. In the event of a hung parliament it is probably that Labour would remain the biggest party, but what would happen then is uncertain. Lib Dem Nick Clegg, a David Cameron impersonator by profession, has taken the Liberal Democrats to the right, and is likely to act as a Tory puppet. It all depends on Brown re-establishing Labour as the party of fairness on the way to economic recovery

Having been Chancellor for 10 years it seems logical that Gordon Brown is the best man to navigate Britain through turbulent financial waters, but even with the wind in his sails, the captain may well go down with the ship.

Obamamania will end in disappointment for all. Barack Obama’s media portrayal, persona and reception really are too good to be true, and the result will be hubris on his part and disillusionment on ours.

While there is a feeling of inevitability (a word used advisedly) that Obama is the president-in-waiting, his image is also built around the theme of “Hope”- everything is designed to suggest that he is some sort of Messiah. His logo, a capital letter “O” in the colours of the American flag, with a sort of rainbow at the bottom, giving the roof of the “O” the look of a rising son in the horizon inspire great expectations. Even the image on the cover of his book “The Audacity of Hope” with him wearing an almost glowing white shirt in front of a white background reinforces this god-like impression.

Obama has been on a “world tour” recently meeting various heads of state/government supposedly trying to rectify his perceived weakness as someone with a lack of foreign policy experience. While this is done with admirable intention, the concern is that, in addition to acting as if he were the current president of the USA, Obama has been taking extreme liberties with European leaders.

Obama seems uninterested in Europe, using it for his ‘experience building’ (as much experience as anyone can gain when they go on a holiday trip, despite being chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee responsible for the continent. The French newspaper Le Monde announced on July 24 that Obama has never asked to meet the European Union’s ambassador in Washington.

This primadonna behaviour was particularly evident not in Berlin, where he was greeted by about 200,000 cheering and fawning supporters, but in London, where he was given a low-key reception outside 10 Downing Street, which made him no more humble. He had a meeting with Gordon Brown followed by a press conference, which Obama conducted on his own, despite the fact that it would be unthinkable for a British prime minister to appear in the White House Rose Garden without the president.

At this stage of the campaign, rhetoric and personality takes priority over real policy, and for the moment at least, Europeans adore Obama. When it becomes time to talk about the issues, especially trade and defence, where Obama has advocated protectionism and hinted that Europe should commit more troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, the shine may wear off. Barack Obama has not even been elected yet, and may just be the hare to McCain’s tortoise.

“Friends” and “Senior Cabinet Colleagues” have sent out this brief, which is therefore not official in any way. Nevertheless, while Labourites can calm down slightly and not worry so much about ousting him Tories are likely to cry first with joy because Brown is leaving, then with sorrow that his unpopularity will fade with him.

There are two scenarios predicted at present: if Labour wins the next general election, Brown will stand down half way through the next parliament so that a successor within the part can be selected and scrutinised. If Labour loses in 2009/2010 then Brown will mimic Michael Howard after 2005.

Although the move is designed to put Labourites at ease and to prevent a coup within the party by Members fearing for their seats, the gesture will undoubtedly fuel flames of speculation regarding the next Labour leader.

Now the main issue is who will take over. At present, it seems like there is no obvious candidate as for years Brown was seen as the only suitable heir to Blair, dissenters were quashed by the Brownites while any surviving contenders held back and were washed aside by a sense of inevitability, Alan Milburn, Charles Clarke and John Reid to name but a few.

Every prominent Labour figure has had their merits and demerits weighed up by now. Alan Johnson would be the most likely and able leader if there were to be an ousting before an election. He is a respected and broadly popular “good chap” with connections to the party base of C1 and C2 voters (‘working classes’), although he seems to have ‘no ambition in that direction’.

David Miliband is the other favourite, mainly because he is young and articulate. As Foreign Secretary, he will have gained significant experience and demonstrated his competence in high office by the time as election has been fought. However, Brown spent 10 years at the Treasury and was the most successful post-war chancellor, and that did not seem to help him much.

Like his predecessor, the announcement of the departure will be another thorny issue, but hopefully Brown will have learned from the “non-election” that speculation gets out of control very quickly. The difference here is that while the public wanted a faster transition from Blair to Brown, weakening Tony’s authority, Browns authority will not suffer as there is as of yet no alternative. The party must get behind Gordon.

[THUNDER BROWN: The Former Iron Chancellor starts the year all guns blazing.]

The Prime Minister is back in Stalin-mode. In fact, based on his message over the New Year and his performance at Prime Minister’s Questions on Jan 9th, calling him ‘Stalin’ may have been an understatement; this time the Clunking Fist is showing no mercy.

David “The Chameleon” Cameron chose to start the session by undercutting the new Nick Clegg, by stealing the Lib Dem Leader’s pet topic, ID Cards. It seemed like a good attack, but Gordon Brown turned it right on its head, nailing Cameron and showing another one of his inconsistencies; he said his ‘personal view’ was against identity cards, and yet he was forced to concede that he was actually in favour of them for foreign nationals. As Brown pointed out to the House, “I see his incursion into Identity Cards did not last long!” After another attempt at an offensive, Cameron was smashed down by Brown, saying, “Once again, all these pre-rehearsed lines, all these lines rehearsed in front of the mirror! Nobody knows what he thinks about the big challenges: not the country, not the party, and probably not even himself.” The House was cheering the PM on, “More! More!” Cameron remained silent for the rest of the session.

The new agenda of Brown ideology is encapsulated in one simple idea; he wants to make ‘the right long-term decisions’. “For Britain, 2008 will be a year of real and serious changes.” His reassuring theme is “steering a course of stability through global financial turbulence”, with this year destined to be “the decisive year of the decade”.

Evidently, the media has hated brown since last summer, purely because he refuses to play the PR game in the same way as David Cameron. His strengths are twisted into negative qualities, no matter how essential to the job they are; rational calculation turned into devious manipulation, caution turned into indecisiveness, determination into dogmatism, long-term vision into inflexibility, seriousness into paranoia. Some of the psychobabble about his personality has been nothing short of disgraceful and lamentable. It is almost amusing how some critics have complained that he is rigidity, unwilling to compromise, unable to cooperate and labelled him a control-freak, then follow up with paragraphs calling him weak-willed quick to abandon his principles.

David Cameron also tried to fight the Prime Minister from an economic front, not really the wisest choice of topic, considering Brown was also nicknamed “The Iron Chancellor” during his ten years at the treasury.

The economy, to give some credit, is in a much better shape than that which Labour inherited from the Tories. At that time, inflation was 10 per cent and the Conservatives could not reduce interest rates, whereas inflation now is 2 per cent, and the Governor of the Bank of England was able to reduce interest rates. There were 3 million unemployed under the Conservatives, and Labour has created 3 million more jobs. Under the Conservatives, 250,000 people lost their mortgages and their homes were repossessed; there are 2 million more homeowners under Labour. Interest rates went as high as 18 per cent under the Conservatives; they have averaged 5 per cent under Labour. We face the global crisis with higher employment than ever before, and we face the global turbulence with low interest rates and low inflation. Of course, all these measures were fervently opposed by the Conservatives, so perhaps that is why they are in opposition.

Brown has had quite a learning curve due to the series of setbacks he faced towards the end of last year. Over Christmas, he has discovered that he is going to have to tighten his grip. Whatever lies in store over the next few months, any trouble will be met “with unbending determination” by the ruthless ‘clunking fist’.

Article published in Impact on 14/01/08

Headline: The ‘Clunking Fist’ Means Serious Business: Careful Dave, Gordon Brown is Back in Town

Standfirst line: Hadleigh Roberts reviews Gordon Brown’s New Year Message and performance at PMQs. The Prime Minister has gone from Stalin to Mr. Bean and back again; he’s taking no prisoners.

While he has yet to set about changing the country, it is evident that he has changed the way government works. For years, there have been four main jobs in the government: Number 10, the Treasury, the Foreign Office, and the Home Office. Now however, Brown has successfully dismantled any obstacles to his agenda.

In the very early days of his premiership, he proclaimed that he wanted a “government of all the talents” meaning that he would call in civil servants, diplomats, anybody, to serve as a GOAT rather than politicians. His second alteration was the mimic the intrepid Sarkozy, by calling in a few opposition ministers, thus expanding the big tent. For all this expansion though, there has been contraction. The Foreign Office has been weakened by the creation of ministries for International Development and the European Union while the Home Office has been dismantled by the introduction of the Ministry for Justice. The most important thing to look at though, is the Treasury.

The Treasury has always acted as a brake for overambitious plans. In the old sitcom Yes, Minister the PM asks, “How do I get the Treasury to agree?” to get the response “You must get the Chancellor to agree.” “But how do I get the Chancellor to agree?” “You must get the Treasury to agree.”

Brown has finally defeated the dragon. After ten years expanding the remit of the Chancellor, blocking (a great deal of) Blair’s madcap antics, he has relegated the Chancellor of the Exchequer to something of a mere Finance Minister. Alistair Darling, appointed for his loyalty and solidity, is a simple puppet.

The Prime Minister’s strength is also one of his greatest weaknesses. Blair had the formidable Iron Chancellor; Robin Cook was famous for ripping Major to bits, and Peter Mandelson was known as a most sneaky strategist. Cameron has an accomplished team of George Osbourne (who earned his stripes over the inheritance tax row), William Hague (with party leadership experience) and David Davis (David Davis has seen off three home secretaries and vying for a fourth). Labour’s Fantastic Four has consolidated to Labour’s Big One.

This asks a very serious question; is it even possible that Brown did not know about the recent scandal, in which illegal immigrants were cleared to work as security guards at various locations including, incredibly, the car park for the PM’s Jaguar?

In Prime Minister’s Questions on the 14th November, Cameron inevitably asked when Brown was informed. He asked three times, but the PM did not waver, and his ‘clunking fist’ slammed down, “I am sorry that the Leader of the Opposition thinks everything should go through No. 10; the Home Office was responsible, and it took action!”

The problem for Gordon Brown is that so few people understand him. Politics moves faster than business, and as such the languages is constantly updating. We heard a lot about the word ‘trust’, which has since been replaced by ‘change’, which has since been replaced by ‘vision’.

The vision argument is an interesting idea. It is also ironic, since Brown’s vision is impaired literally, the lost the sight in one eye during a rugby match, and politically, since it is in a language most people don’t understand. David Cameron was furious after the Queen’s Speech, claiming that the Brown Agenda “lacks vision”. This is of course utter nonsense, but the problem is that because people do not look beyond the ‘big ideas’ of the day, his speciality day-to-day legislative programs go unheeded.

One of Tony Blair’s genius traits was that he was able to present incremental changes as revolutionary, compromising while crusading. Cameron, who was brought in to be ‘Blairer than Blair’ can do this too, and can attract progressives despite lurching to the right. Brown does not have such articulation, and finds it difficult to understand that his audience has such little background knowledge.

Some measures are genuinely radical. The leaving age of education will be raised to 18, and the introduction of diplomas is designed to bring the United Kingdom into line with other European countries. Of course, this comparison will not be widely publicised, since the British are prone to irrational anti-Europeanism. The house building scheme is ambitious, albeit the minimum required. Nobody can deny that Gordon Brown has vision, but sometimes it is necessary to participate in a committee reporting to a think-tank regarding “universal progressivism” to find it.

Labour does have a number of talented individuals, but they have yet to prove themselves. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, can project beyond Westminster although his political talents are currently engaged in seeing off his Africa minister. Ed Balls, the schools supremo, has the requisite intellectual and mental toughness as well. Whatever the case, Captain Brown will only succeed if he takes his lieutenants over the top with him.