At a Christmas party I witnessed a showdown between two Labour movers and shakers, one a devoted Starmerite, the other an unrepentant Blairite, over whether the Prime Minister can turn things around. They didn’t agree on much – Keir Starmer’s vision or lack of it, Europe, immigration, you name it. When I commented to another leading figure in the party that Blairites, with the exception of Jonathan Powell (now running foreign policy) and Alastair Campbell (whose podcast has moved him leftwards), seem to have lost faith in this government, this former minister said: ‘Of course they have, because this is the second term of Gordon Brown.’
Among Brownites, it is customary to bemoan the short tenure of their hero and blame his lack of success on Tony Blair’s refusal to stand aside before he had served a decade in No. 10. If only Gordon had had a full term, they complain, we might have had a ‘real’ Labour government. While Blairites often admit New Labour was a joint enterprise, Brownites usually see their vision of opportunity dispensed from on high as the true faith and the Blairite approach of conferring rights on voters as consumers of reformed public services as an aberration.
One way to interpret the Starmer government is to see it as the final triumph of Brown’s communitarian creed over Blairite individualism. The most damning comparison is that, after but a handful of months in charge, it became clear that both Brown and Starmer, who had spent a decade manoeuvring for power, had little plan for what to do when they finally gained it.
In Brown’s refusal to call a quick election in 2007 you can see Starmer’s caution when bold solutions are needed. Starmer’s speech to the party conference, indulging the left’s view of itself, was pure Brown – listing triumphs which had not moved the polls and revealing a moral displeasure of political opponents – but with no Blairite correction to the mean, as used to happen at New Labour conferences.
Brown’s reputation was saved by his decisive action during the global financial crisis. Starmer’s activities on Ukraine, Greenland and other international matters come from the same animating hope that the Prime Minister can play statesman and forget the dirty compromises of domestic politics.
They have a similar approach to decision-making, too – stare for long enough at a problem until the only decent solution can be divined, a form of process-driven procrastination which also afflicted Theresa May and Rishi Sunak. A source close to Downing Street characterises this approach as: ‘Let’s have meetings, let’s have processes; it’s always someone else’s fault; we’re so obsessed with fairness, we never take responsibility for anything; there’s nothing that another round of Fabianism can’t solve. Why don’t the public say “thank you” for all the good things we’ve decided they should have?’
‘For the past 15 years, Gordon has been a nuisance caller to Labour leaders. Now they’re taking his calls’
There’s no doubting which ex-leader has the Prime Minister’s ear. Starmer decided to reverse the two-child benefit cap in part because Brown lobbied him for months, urging the moral mission of a war on child poverty. ‘For much of the past 15 years, Gordon has been a nuisance caller to Labour leaders,’ observes a prominent Labour figure. ‘Now they’re taking his calls and doing what he wants.’ Labour’s attacks on the gambling industry are pure Brown, who scrapped supercasinos the second he got to No. 10.
The calls between Blair and Starmer have dried up, while the Tony Blair Institute, arguably the most inventive thinktank on the left, seems increasingly to be speaking into a void. ‘Tony has basically given up on Keir,’ says a Blair ally.
Brown was a titan as chancellor and comparisons are not often drawn with his admirer Rachel Reeves, a diminished figure. But the manner in which No. 10 has overruled the Treasury in recent months (forcing U-turns on the family farms tax and business rate rises for pubs) mirrors how Brown as prime minister tried to exert control over it – leading to clashes with Alistair Darling. ‘Gordon wanted to run the Treasury by remote control,’ says a Labour veteran.
It is hard to think of a time when the Treasury was weaker than it is today. One of the legion of former Tory chancellors says: ‘My view is that Rachel has traded her power over economic policy in order to stay in her job. She has made everything joint – frankly unheard of before – in order to make sure she is joined at the hip with Keir. In her own terms it has worked, as he has also concluded losing her would be terminal for him. Her only red line, which Keir accepts, seems to be her fiscal rules. That may mean we can carry on borrowing but doesn’t resolve issues around growth.’
A former Labour cabinet minister agrees: ‘The Treasury under Reeves is a pale shadow of its former self. No depth, no network, no self-confidence and no quality political leadership. It must seem odd for those working there with longer memories.’
It is not all Reeves’s fault. ‘Do not underestimate how unbelievably poor the Treasury is at official level these days,’ says a former mandarin. ‘They are maddeningly bad, and there’s so many of them at the top of the shop that there’s no one really in charge.’ In this telling, James Bowler, the permanent secretary, is surrounded by officials who run their sections like private fiefdoms. ‘It used to be an unbelievably Stalinist organisation which argued among itself but was very disciplined in dealing with people outside. It was anarchic but also really hierarchical. It’s lost its way… They’re all jostling for position.’
This institutional decay (and the ceding of authority to the Office for Budget Responsibility) explains why the Treasury under Reeves, unlike under Brown or George Osborne, fails to make either a coherent economic or political argument about growth, job creation or tax reform.
Even some Blairites think comparing Brown and Starmer is unfair. The former cabinet minister says: ‘Gordon had dense knowledge, constant curiosity and intellectual flair, whatever his other flaws. Keir just has the flaws – a vapidness and uninterest in economics which is startling.’
Perhaps the truth is that while Labour needed a chancellor of the ballast and vision of Gordon Brown, it has instead got Gordon Brown the flat-footed and visionless PM.
Comments