More from The Week

Denver, Colorado Just as high street stores send spies to the Paris fashion shows in order to copy all the latest designs, so British political parties send agents to American conventions in search of ideas and inspiration. Several Brits were skulking around the Democratic National Convention in Denver this week, carefully noting the new soundbites and attack lines that were being unveiled on the world’s greatest political catwalk. Yet if these Labour and Tory emissaries were doing their job properly they’ll come back with bleak news — because the four-day convention showed both British parties how vulnerable they truly are. All the excitement in the thin mountain air was underpinned by mild panic. Everything has, in theory, gone right for Barack Obama.

When R.A. Butler, quoting Bismarck, described politics as the ‘art of the possible’, he was spelling out the pragmatist’s creed. Yet, if nothing else, Barack Obama’s rise to become the Democrats’ candidate for the White House shows that ‘the possible’ can still be extraordinary. Only four years ago, Obama was a mere state senator in Illinois, a rookie legislator with a keen intellect and a bright future. Now, as his party gathers for its convention in Denver, Colorado, he is only two and half months away from the presidential election that could make him the most powerful man in the world.

Irwin Stelzer reviews the week in politics  There are several ways one might look at Gordon Brown’s leaked plan to send £150 to each of the seven-plus million families receiving child benefit. The first, and kindest, is as an attempt to ease the coming winter’s budget strain on what Sir Brian Bender, permanent secretary at the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, during a first-class train ride from Leeds to London, too loudly dubbed ‘ordinary people’ — not the needy, the more numerous ‘ordinary’. The second is as a straight-out election bribe, part of the ‘fight-back’ that the Prime Minister is planning for the autumn.

One Cabinet minister described it to me with dark wit as the ‘Eden Project’: the idea being that, after a summer of reflection, Gordon Brown is gently or not-so-gently persuaded to retire, in the manner of Anthony Eden, on the grounds of ‘ill health’. To which the PM’s entirely predictable response is: have you seen how many press-ups I can do? The revelation that he has hired a personal trainer may have been clunky, but it was a clear signal that he is not going to oblige those who would like him to quit on medical grounds. I would call the first round of the great Miliband–Brown bout a dead heat. The Foreign Secretary achieved what no other Cabinet minister has done before him, which was to force Gordon to call off his attack dogs.

So madly introspective and self-obsessed has Labour become that it seems almost impolite to intrude upon its private agonies. Yet since the party is still notionally governing the nation it is our duty to knock on the door, and ask what all the tears and shouting are about. The conduct of the government since the Glasgow East by-election has been a study in the pathology of denial. The Prime Minister and his colleagues insist that they are ‘getting on with the job’ and focusing on the public’s priorities — refusing, so they claim, to be distracted by little local difficulties.

The wonder of the National Curriculum Tests marking scandal is that it has taken a decade for the inadequacies of the school exam system to become widely known. As Liz Brocklehurst, a former exam marker, reveals in this issue (see page 21), the exam system has been in crisis since being politicised in David Blunkett’s days as education secretary. For ten years, markers have been put under pressure to interpret answers in a bizarrely over-generous fashion, even to the point of marking obviously wrong answers as correct. Little has been revealed about such practices because the markers have been sworn to secrecy.

Gordon Brown is not used to being spoken back to in Cabinet, which made a recent session on tackling David Cameron all the more memor-able. The civil servants were sent away, as is the custom at political Cabinet meetings, and the Prime Minister laid forth the Gospel according to St Gordon. The Conservatives had not changed, he said, and the next election would be a choice between Tory cuts and Labour investment — the narrative of the 2001 and 2005 campaigns. When he finished, there was an embarrassed silence. Then, one by one, his colleagues told him why he was wrong. This time last year, the Prime Minister could have told them that the moon (or Mr Cameron) was made of green cheese without fear of contradiction.

Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates. For all the latest on the Glasgow East by-election, visit Coffee House When Tony Blair was Prime Minister he used to joke in private that his writ — like that of the Roman Empire — ended at Hadrian’s Wall. Beyond that lay Gordon’s land, a graveyard for Conservatives, home of the murky Scottish Labour party and a press corps whom Mr Blair once described with a phrase unprintable in this magazine.