Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I don't know what the opposite of a back-handed complement is, but it is what Peter Oborne pays Gordon Brown in his Saturday column in the Mail (not on-line yet). He argues - and see his comment in my PS below - that Brown is too good to get away with trying to be all things to all people as he sucks up the centre ground. He lists all the contradictions (he hates Thatcher, he admires her, etc) and suggests,
The new prime minister is calculating that the Labour Party will tolerate his inconsistencies and equivocations in the way it once accepted similar behaviour from Tony Blair. My guess is that he will get away with it, at least in the short term.
Looking further ahead, however, I wonder whether Gordon Brown is capable of sustaining the kind of deceit which this kind of ‘big tent’ politics involves. Being Janus-faced came naturally to Tony Blair.. Deep inside, I don’t believe that Gordon Brown is that kind of empty, unprincipled, meretricious figure. So I wonder whether he can carry on misleading the British people…
This points towards a quick election. I also think Peter is onto something. Brown can sound weak in pursuing this strategy. Compare him and Cameron in the first shaping days of this month. On 4 September, asked about his view of Thatcher, Brown prepared the way for the invitation to tea by telling the No 10 press conference,
I believe, and I have said before, that I am also a conviction politician. I am convinced about certain things, that we have got to support the talent of every individual in the country, that people have got to respect other people, that we have got to have a work ethic that works, that we have got to have discipline, as I have said, in our communities, and that is the only way with families working well and communities well, that we can do well as a country. So I am a conviction politician like her.
If this feeble litany of knee jerks is indeed the totality of the PM's convictions he is in trouble. Contrast it to Cameron's confident summary of his convictions - Be a doer not a done-for - on 7 September:
If you believe in family, responsibility and opportunity, if you know that those are your values, what is the political agenda that flows from that? As night follows day it means that the most important driving force of everything you do, the principle and purpose of your politics, is to give people more freedom and control over their lives.... because if you believe in responsibility, you have to give people freedom. You literally cannot be responsible for something unless you have power and control over it. And it's because opportunity means the freedom to be a doer not a done-for, taking down the barriers so that everybody can make the most of their life.
Part of what is going on here is that when Brown does try and address strategy, the obvious example is the Green Paper on the constitution, the media is uninterested and does not think there is 'a story'. On the other hand it revels in low politics and Conservative body-snatching, even when the cadaver is clearly beyond all possible use even for medical purposes. It pays to be Janus! In the short run, that is. To pursue Oborne's argument, in politics how you live is how you will die. Even Blair could not buck this law. It may be less his integrity than his pride, but Brown will not want to leave office surrounded by the contempt for his double-talk that hollowed out his immediate predecessor. He really, seriously does want to have a lasting love-it-or-hate-it-but-you-have-to-admire-it reputation like Thatcher's. And that kind of conviction is incompatible with a big tent.
PS: an email response from Peter Oborne: "Thank you! There is a very striking contrast between the snake oil merchants Saatchi portrayal of Brown as a man of substance...and Brown's wholly opportunistic behaviour in employing Saatchi. Likewise Brown claims to admire Margaret Thatcher, a preposterous thing to say for somebody whose central selling point is that he is a man of conviction. I agree with you that this contradiction argues very much for an early election, because I very much doubt that Brown can plausibly go on being all things to all men for very long."
