Irwin Stelzer

Brown’s golden rules have been exposed as a sham, says Irwin Stelzer, but the Tory response has been feeble. Their target should be the PM’s feathering of Old Labour nests The good news is that Gordon Brown’s golden rules are no more. These rules did not stop the then chancellor from launching a spending binge. They did not stop him from spilling red ink all over the nation’s books at a time when the flow of cash into the Treasury was at record levels. They did not stop him from raising taxes, 60 times by some counts. They did not stop him from redistributing income from wealth-creators to wealth-consumers.

‘I was born for this moment,’ Gordon Brown is said to have told a small group at a recent dinner party. The Prime Minister is too keen a student of history not to have known that he was parroting Winston Churchill’s famous remark on becoming Prime Minister in 1940, ‘I felt... that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’ Perhaps it was reasonable of him to contend that the current financial crisis is as dire a threat to the British way of life as Adolf Hitler, perhaps not. But why quibble? The Prime Minister is entitled to his bump in the polls, the new spring in his step: ‘a dour man rejuvenated by the gloom’, according to my Sunday Times colleagues.

Gordon Brown’s critics are confused. For months they have been accusing him of dithering, of timidity, of being unable to make the bold moves that are needed if his government is to get a grip on the unfolding problems in the financial sector and, now, in the economy as a whole. Now that he has shown more than a bit of both decisiveness and courage by bringing Peter Mandelson back from what most fair-minded people recognise is a credible stint as European trade commissioner, the critics have shifted gears. Mandelson is not the man to help craft policies with which to fight the emerging economic crisis because... well, because he is Peter Mandelson.

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.

Spare a moment for a story in which Gordon Brown is the good guy. Not as exciting as tales of the money trail from David Abrahams to the Labour party’s coffers; nor as bloodcurdling as tales of crimes committed by untold numbers of illegal immigrants; nor as nervous-making as the possibility of identity theft from tens of millions of lost HM Revenue and Customs files; nor as economically immediate as tales of a busted bank. But of more enduring consequence for Britain’s economy and its social structure. Soon, very soon if City rumours are correct, some top executives will face criminal charges — not from overzealous American cops, but from Britain’s very own cartel busters.

Smile and shoeshine get you only so far in any business, says Irwin Stelzer. But Labour is still vulnerable if the Tory leader produces solid conservative policies David Cameron is confused. Understandably. For two reasons. First, those who are urging him to abandon policy-lite in favour of more heft are the very same who favour policies that would lead to disaster at the polls. The result is confusion between the need to reject the specific policies they propose, and the need to offer voters something more than a smile and shoeshine, to borrow from Arthur Miller. There are, after all, policies and there are policies. There are policies based on Euro- paranoia, and policies that reflect a healthy scepticism of the emerging European superstate.

There is little doubt, as Matthew d’Ancona and others have pointed out, that Gordon Brown is secure in the thought that he has established himself as what is called these days a ‘change agent’, cutting the ground out from Tory cries that ‘It’s time for a change.’ If you want change, go for the experienced clunking fist rather that the PR tyro. Unfortunately, not all change is in Britain’s interest. Which brings me to the by now, or at any rate soon to be, forgotten visit of the Prime Minister to President Bush’s retreat at Camp David.

In guessing at the shape of Gordon Brown’s premiership, we have to ignore two groups. First, there are the idolaters, the inner clique that believes, really believes, that application of the Brown intellect to the social and foreign policy problems facing Britain will cause those problems to crumble under the pounding of that clunking fist. More of what has been on offer from No. 11 is all that is needed at No. 10. Then there are the critics so blinded by their hatred of Gordon Brown for his stealth taxes, his pension raid, his redistributionist proclivities, his secrecy, his clannishness, his Scottishness, his unpressed clothes — or their exclusion from his circle — that they are unable to recognise his virtues and accomplishments.

Don’t say Tony Blair didn’t warn you that you won’t like a world in which America has decided to become a self-centred spectator rather than a player. That day seems to be approaching, a response to the self-indulgent anti-Americanism that has become so fashionable in Britain and Europe. The American presidential election campaign is about to get serious, and sooner than usual, since about half of all the delegates to the nominating conventions of the Democratic and Republican parties will have been chosen less than a year from now.