Brown’s Blues: Britain’s PM on Borrowed Time

It was billed as tragedy — an insurrection that would topple the Labour Party’s flawed hero, Gordon Brown — but it played out like a Marx Brothers farce. The June 8 meeting that would determine Brown’s fate attracted so many Labour MPs and members of the House of Lords that a House of Commons committee room quickly filled to capacity. And still they came, squeezing their way into the mass of bodies politic. When a clutch of tardy ministers wrenched open the doors, pressure-packed colleagues tumbled into the corridor, itself lousy with reporters poised to relay the verdict.

That verdict, after the hoopla and spiraling speculation over Brown’s future, was anticlimactic. The Prime Minister prevailed over the few rebels who dared advance a case for his ouster. It was a whimpering end to an uprising that had seen attacks on Brown’s leadership from across the party, and serial resignations from his Cabinet. Just four days before, James Purnell, one of the party’s brightest young stars, had delivered a Dear Gordon letter on the eve of a reshuffle that would have reaffirmed his own place at the Cabinet table. “I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more, not less likely,” he told Brown. (See pictures of Brown as he prepared to become Prime Minister.)

Purnell was referring to parliamentary elections due by next June, but the results of last week’s municipal and European polls — a historic rout for Labour, a solid performance from the Conservatives and gains for fringe outfits including the far-right British National Party — graphically illustrated the concerns that launched Purnell’s kamikaze mission. Labour’s support has slumped under Brown. It has hemorrhaged support among the affluent voters of Middle England whose endorsement is essential to securing a parliamentary majority, and whom it wooed successfully in the 1990s. And it has been damaged, too, in hardscrabble industrial regions. A fresh face might be expected to give the party a boost and could hardly perform worse. But Brown picked up the keys to 10 Downing Street from Tony Blair, and any handover of power from one unelected Prime Minister to another would ratchet up pressure from political opponents and the public for an early election. When it came to the crunch, MPs — many of whom fear losing their seats — opted to put off the moment of truth. In retrospect, that was not surprising; turkeys rarely vote for an early Christmas.

Is His Party Really Over?
Still, an election must come within a year, and promises to answer a question of far more enduring significance than who should lead Labour. The issue is whether there will be a Labour Party left to lead. This isn’t just about the danger of electoral wipeout, although that possibility is very real. The center-left consensus that has shaped Britain since Labour swept to power under Blair in 1997 is disintegrating, and the New Labour project that created it — the potent mix of idealism and pragmatism, of social-democratic aspirations and fiscal conservatism, of commitment to equality and opportunity — needs a radical overhaul. The big question: Can Labour recast itself, delineate a new identity and purpose? Or is this party, like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, definitely deceased? (Read “European Elections: A Blow to Brown, Boost for Merkel.”)

Connecting with voters after 12 years in government isn’t easy. In a society such as Britain, where politics is a contact sport, every crunching tackle covered by a breathless and indefatigable national media, the bonds between the public and their elected leaders inevitably fray over time. But connecting with voters who believe politicians to be corrupt, venal and self-obsessed is an even taller order. And that is now Labour’s task. The party has endured a long, slow decline, but its current crisis was triggered by one of the greatest press exposés of the modern age. It started when a former soldier and Conservative supporter called John Wicks contacted the Telegraph Media Group with a disc containing details of MPs’ expenses claims. Quite how Wicks came by the disc remains a mystery, but its contents now are not.

The expenses claims ranged from hilarious to heinous, from charges for replacing a bath plug to maintaining a moated residence. And they demonstrated that some politicians routinely worked the system to minimize their personal tax burden at public cost — much of this falling within rules agreed by MPs over years to enhance their remuneration without having to publicly award themselves fatter pay packets. Over 27 days of revelations in the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, politicians of all hues have been implicated and their reputations trashed.

When William Lewis, Telegraph editor-in-chief, first looked at the material Wicks brought him, he felt “physically sick,” he says. “I knew at that moment we had no option but to publish because the readers needed to know what I had just been shown.” Initial coverage focused on Labour. “In the early days we took a lot of heat from senior people in the Labour government about why we were starting with them,” says Lewis.

Conspiracy theories were bound to flourish given Wicks’ political affiliations and the Telegraph‘s own establishment credentials. Once nicknamed “The Torygraph,” one of the daily’s most famous editors served as a Conservative Cabinet minister; among its current star columnists is its former reporter, the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Lewis vehemently denies any suggestion of bias. The decision to start with government was purely editorial, he says, and MPs from the Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties were subsequently scrutinized with the same vigor. “Had this expenses story landed in a different environment, it wouldn’t have had this impact, of pushing the government to the verge of going,” says Lewis. A Telegraph banner headline captured the spirit of the monster it had itself unleashed: A VERY BRITISH REVOLUTION.

Horror on the Doorstep
In another country, reports of elected representatives milking their expenses might send folk on to the streets to burn a few cars. Britons are angry — you only need to drop the word politician into a conversation to discover just how furious they are — but their anger is of the slow-burning, passive-aggressive variety of a people who wear socks with sandals. All the mainstream parties encountered hostility on the doorstep as they campaigned for last week’s elections, but Labour, as the party of government, was perceived to carry the heaviest responsibility. “When we talk about the end of New Labour — and it is the end of New Labour if it hadn’t died already — what really has gone on is that the country has said, as one, we’re not going to put up with this any more,” says Lewis.

Watch an interview with Gordon Brown.

See the top 10 most outrageous British expense claims.

Scanning the front pages of the Telegraph and rival newspapers he sells from his central London shop, Pankaj Mehta highlights another reason the expenses scandal hit Labour hardest. Reports of Conservative grandees submitting bills for the upkeep of mansions have reinforced the party’s unfortunate image of entitlement and wealth, but the vision of Labour MPs subsidizing their lifestyles is more damaging still. New Labour defined itself as a party that encouraged wealth creation, that in the words of Peter Mandelson, Business Secretary and Brown’s de facto deputy, was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.” But it still prioritized the needs of ordinary Britons. “When you see politicians charging for small things, like a bathroom plug, you know they don’t care about the common people,” says Mehta. The message from opinion polls is unequivocal: the majority of Britons favor an early election to restore faith in Parliament. Mehta concurs. The only difference between Britain and a dictatorship, he says, “is that here they cling onto power legally. There should be an election; let the people decide.”

Brown’s victory against the rebels could leave Mehta hanging on until next year for a chance to kick — or kick out — his MP. But the Prime Minister faces further bruising tests even before September, when Labour arrives in Brighton, a raffish seaside resort, for its annual conference, the traditional moment for coup attempts. And that’s presuming Brown weathers two by-elections sparked by the expenses scandal. Michael Martin, a Labour MP serving in the party-neutral role of Speaker, or chair, of the Commons, steps down later this month. He was forced out after MPs’ protests that he was an obstacle to parliamentary reform. Ian Gibson resigned his marginal seat after a Labour committee examining the expenses revelations ruled he could not stand for the party at the next election. (See pictures of polarizing politicians at LIFE.com.)

Punching Above His Weight
MPs pledged to support Brown after he promised to change. “There are some things I do well and some things I do not so well,” he said as faced down his critics. Both parts of that statement are accurate. Some of the things Brown does well are those that helped build New Labour’s reputation. Old Labour was the party of tax and spend. New Labour, for the first two years after its 1997 victory, adhered to stringent spending plans set by its Conservative predecessors. Even after that date, as Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Finance Minister — the office that best suited Brown — he held to his “golden rule,” borrowing only to invest, and resisted raising the tax rate paid by top earners to fund Labour’s social-justice and equality initiatives.

The financial crisis that broke last year played to Brown’s strengths. He handled policy as well as any national leader, even if there were questions about the light-touch system of financial regulation he had championed. And he hosted the G-20 economic summit in London deftly, showing there were times when, even after Blair, Britain could punch above its weight. (See a TIME video from outside the G-20.)

Yet even as the downturn forced Labour to dump its tarnished rule to start spending like Paris Hilton on a shopping spree, it revealed weaknesses in Labour’s orthodoxy about wealth creation as the means to social justice. After years of boom, the gap between rich and poor in Britain has actually widened, while higher earners face swingeing future taxes to plug a widening deficit. And some of the things Brown does not do so well are the things that have made him vulnerable to leadership challenges. A serious man, a well-meaning man, he’s a hopeless communicator in an age of remorseless, ceaseless communication. He’s also tribal and factional. Faultlines between his foot soldiers and Blair’s adherents persist two years after collateral damage from the Iraq war — and the two men’s bitter rivalry — persuaded Blair to stand aside. Labour’s third term in office, secured in 2005, has been “blighted,” says Neil Stewart, who was Political Secretary to Neil Kinnock, Labour’s leader during its wilderness years in the 1980s and early 1990s. “This third term should have been the most reforming. It’s been first waiting for Tony to go and then waiting for Gordon to make his mind up. I can hardly believe the damage of that internecine battle, just how utterly destructive and wasteful of huge amounts of political capital that was.”

He Says He’s the Great Reformer
Stewart witnessed at close hand Labour’s shock defeat in the 1992 election it was widely expected to win. That defeat inspired Labour’s painful decision to throw out old class-war shibboleths and remake itself for a newly prosperous nation. The party now faces a similar proposition, Stewart believes: reform or die. “If the Labour Party fails to reform itself, then the second stage is that the electorate will reform it by throwing it out,” he says, adding: “Barring an event like the Falklands War which helped save [Margaret] Thatcher, Labour is on a trajectory to a deep loss that could mean not just the disintegration of the Labour party but the end of strong social-democratic politics in Britain.”

By a strange twist, the crises engulfing Labour are forcing the party to tackle issues central to what might be called “New New Labour” concerns: recalibrating economic policy for reshaped realities; overhauling Britain’s antiquated parliamentary system to increase accountability and transparency; reviewing its electoral system to broaden participation. On June 10, Brown announced a raft of proposals, including a part-elected House of Lords, independent regulation of Parliament and a statutory code of conduct for MPs. “The expenses crisis has actually delivered us an amazing opportunity for radical change,” says Ben Bradshaw, newly created Culture Secretary in Brown’s reconstituted Cabinet. “Gordon is talking about reforming the machine, about real constitutional and political reform.”

That would be nice, if Brown has the strength to make a difference. But after 12 years, and facing a public whose attitude to politicians is a toxic mixture of weariness and disgust, the problem for the Prime Minister, as for Labour, will be persuading anyone to listen.

Read “Gordon Brown Keeps Job, But Problems Remain.”

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