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Update 20.3 July 2009 The survival of Gordon Brown

How has Gordon Brown managed to survive as Prime Minister? He is battered by bad economic news; disastrously adrift in the polls; has lost several Cabinet Ministers to a mix of discontent and scandal; and presides over ever more catastrophic election results for the Labour Party. It is plain that the resignation of James Purnell, his Work and Pensions Secretary, on 3 June almost brought him down. Yet he remains in office. Beyond the immediate headlines it is worth thinking out the reasons for this survival because they tell us a lot about political leadership in the Westminster core executive. He has survived for four reasons.

1. He doesn't want to go. Most normal people, faced with evidence that everyone around them thinks they should quit, would probably resign out of embarrassment and dejection. Politicians, especially those at the top, are not normal people: they are intensely driven by self belief and ambition. Brown spent a decade convinced that he, not Tony Blair, should be Prime Minister; his self-belief is stronger than that of any normal person.
2. He commands huge powers of patronage. Recall that the resignations from the government, even if we include those like the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith who publicly insisted that they supported him, were a tiny proportion of the 'payroll' vote. In the reconstructed government of June 2009, 23 Cabinet Ministers, and 87 outside the government, all owed their positions, and salaries, to Brown. (For a full list see http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/05/gordon-brown-new-cabinet-list.)
3. The rules make a challenge difficult, and much more difficult than in the past. The boxed features on pp. 303 and 308 of Politics and Governance in the UK summarise the evolution of leadership selection methods in the Conservative and Labour Parties. They show a growth in formality of method, and a widening of the 'electorate' over time. Before the changes, that began in the 1980s, a leader in either party could be removed simply by a conspiracy within the Parliamentary party; now, a much wider range of people and groups have to be involved.
4. This puts a premium on a well organised campaign to depose Brown. But his opponents have been ineffective, poorly coordinated and often timid. The reason for this in turn is revealing: the opposition to Brown has no ideological cohesion. The only member of the Cabinet to resign with an overt challenge to the Prime Minister, James Purnell, did not even mention policy differences in his letter of resignation; his objection to Brown is only that he cannot win Labour the next election. Purnell is usually identified as a 'Blairite', but the Blarites, insofar as they exist as a faction against Brown, are united against him only by personal animosity; there is no significant policy divide. The advocates of more radical left wing policies on the backbenches have been unwilling to combine with the Blairites, on the perfectly sensible ground that they would gain nothing in policy terms from a leadership change. The only glimmer of a principled (as distinct from electoral) foundation for opposition has come from some resignations by women Ministers, notably that of Caroline Flint. But the impact of this has been reduced by the fact that Flint appeared to discover her feminist objections to Brown overnight, when she was denied a Cabinet post; and by the fact that the most principled feminist in the Cabinet, Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman, has explicitly disavowed those who claim that the Brown has difficulties with women. The turnover of Conservative Party leaders since the fall of Mrs Thatcher in 1990 has led some commentators to argue that the Conservatives are a more ruthless party in dismissing electorally unsuccessful leaders. But in reality leadership turmoil in the Conservative Party has been driven in this period by far deeper divisions over principles than is the case in the Labour Party: by incendiary divisions over Europe, and by deep philosophical differences over what modern Conservatism should stand for in a society undergoing rapid social and cultural change.

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