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Student Zone - Update Materials

Update 12: January 2007 - Preparing for a Brown Premiership

It now seems very likely that Gordon Brown will defy one of the most powerful tendencies at the top of British political life: that ‘natural’ successors never succeed to the Premiership. He is almost certain to become the first natural successor since Anthony Eden in 1955 to succeed to that office, sometime in 2007.

Preparing for a Brown Premiership nevertheless continues to be a brutal business. At the start of September 2006 the government spent several days in complete chaos as backbenchers tried to press Mr Blair into announcing a date for this resignation, preferably an immediate date. A private letter to this effect was circulated at Westminster signed, apparently, by many of the 2001 intake of Labour MPs. Six Parliamentary Private Secretaries – semi-official if entirely unimportant members of the Administration - resigned. Tom Watson, the Defence Minister, and a known close ally of Mr Brown, also resigned, demanding that the Prime Minister go. Two long, and by media accounts immensely tense and acrimonious, meetings between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister followed.

If this was, as Blair supporters briefed the media, an attempt at a Brownite ‘coup’ designed to force the Prime Minister out immediately, it failed. But it did set a date for the end of the Blair Premiership. On 7 September, faced with the prospect of continuing chaos, the Prime Minister committed himself to depart within the year: "I would have preferred to do this in my own way but… the next party conference in a couple of weeks will be my last party conference as party leader, the next TUC conference next week will be my last TUC - probably to the relief of both of us. But I am not going to set a precise date now. I don't think that's right. I will do that at a future date and I'll do it in the interests of the country and depending on the circumstances of the time." Though it was uncertain at the time that this would be sufficient to stabilise the situation, the months since then have indeed been marked by a kind of peace, though an uneasy one. In December anonymous media briefings sought to implicate the Chancellor in the ‘cash for peerages’ affair (see Update 10.1). The briefings drew an angry public denial from the Chancellor, and a very pointed reminder that he had been as ignorant as the rest of the public about Labour’s practice of taking undeclared loans from rich benefactors.

The Party nevertheless seems to have settled down to preparing for a Brown Premiership, because all the likely credible opponents in an election contest have calculated that they have little chance of winning. Some Blairites still hanker after a young Blairite Pretender to challenge the Chancellor, but none of the likely runners is prepared to fight this time around.For young rivals like David Miliband it is rational to let Brown, a much older man, try and possibly fail at the next general election. If he fails a Blairite challenge will undoubtedly be mounted. Among established figures at present only John Reid, the Home Secretary, remains as a possible opponent. The rules of the contest have helped reinforce the Brown position. If there is a vacancy and a contest, an electoral college split three equal ways between unions, Labour MPs and constituency members makes the choice. Mr Brown is believed to have the large union votes overwhelmingly committed. Most likely candidates even face a considerable hurdle at nomination, which must be supported by 12.5% (44) members of the present Parliamentary Labour Party.

These considerations help explain why, since the September chaos, there have been attempts to prepare for a Brown Premiership. These include efforts to manage the Chancellor’s public image, partly to soften his austere public reputation, and to match the ‘family friendly’ image cultivated by the Conservative Leader, David Cameron. But there are also more substantial kinds of preparation. Over the years Brown has vastly extended the range of Treasury intervention in domestic policy in the name of accountability and efficiency, to a point where he has long been able to act as a kind of surrogate ‘domestic affairs’ Prime Minister. But this has now expanded into wide ranging long term reviews of whole areas of policy. The appearance of the Chancellor’s pre-budget report in December – itself virtually a review of the whole of domestic policy – coincided closely with the publication of three long term policy reviews: the Leitch review of the nation’s labour skills; the Barker report on land-use planning; and the Eddington report on long term national transport strategy. None of these in ‘normal’ times would be thought a natural Treasury concern.

The Chancellor has often been described as ‘lucky’, both in the sense that he has presided over the economy in a period of historically unprecedented growth and prosperity, and in the sense that he often seems to have been rescued from tight economic corners - in respect of growth projections and public sector debt projections, for example. It now seems that he may be lucky in his departure date, at least as far as the public finances are concerned. In his pre budget report in December 2006 he added £1-2 billion in each forecasting year to public borrowing. He only met his ‘golden rule’ – to borrow only what he needs for investment over the whole spending cycle – by changing the length of the cycle, this time to ten years. (The Chancellor has gained a reputation for flexibility in how he measures the cycle.As always, the most informative and neutral account of all this can be found at the Institute for Fiscal Studies web site: http://www.ifs.org.uk). If he moves next door to 10 Downing Street next summer he will leave the problems of balancing the public finances to a less fortunate successor. But an even bigger problem will face Mr Brown as soon as he steps inside Number 10: what to do about Iraq (See Update 13).

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