Labour's Samson

I came across this curious article recently while researching something else.

But the piece by John Rentoul appeared originally back in September 2011 - at the time of the publication of a biography of Gordon Brown - by the well known author Anthony Seldon.

I didn't quite get the reference to 'Labour's Samson' at first although it came back to me after a bit of research - which reminded me that the biblical figure of Samson wasted all of his natural 'God given' talents before finally bringing the temple down upon his own head - in a terrible act of revenge.

I suppose that's as good a metaphor as any for the final days of New Labour - with all the plotting and scheming and general bad behaviour towards colleagues that typified its final days - and that was from the people who were ostensibly all on the same side.

The funny thing is that several of the people mentioned in John Rentoul's piece are still helping to run the Labour Party these days - Harriet Harman and her husband Jack Dromey, Tom Watson and Ed Balls are all key supporters of the current Labour leader Ed Miliband.

And do you know something really spooky?

Jack used to be the deputy general secretary of Unite and Tom Watson used to share a flat with Len McCluskey - the current general secretary of Unite.

As they say, it's a small world.

Gordon Brown: Labour’s Samson

By John Rentoul

Three things struck me. One was the first assertion as fact, although in the book I suspect the footnote will be “private information”, that Gordon Brown personally put Jack Dromey up to his television interview in which he said that, as Labour Treasurer, he knew nothing about the secret loans that financed the 2005 election campaign. That helped to trigger the Metropolitan Police inquiry into the fanciful allegation that Tony Blair offered peerages in return for loans, which was never going to end in charges but which weakened Blair greatly.

Brown personally phoned Cabinet colleague Harriet Harman, who also happened to be wife of Jack Dromey, the Labour Party treasurer. Boldly, he instructed her to tell Dromey to make a speech advocating the ‘cleaning up’ of Labour’s funding, knowing that this would profoundly embarrass Blair.

The second is the assertion, again as fact, that Ed Balls “pressed the button” on the coup of September 2006, which forced Blair to set a 12-month time limit on his premiership:*

In the words of one of Brown’s inner team: ‘Ed concluded that Gordon had left it too late. If he didn’t press the button himself, nothing was going to happen.’ So Balls spoke to Tom Watson, the Brownite MP, and hatched a plot for a series of letters to be written by Labour MPs calling on Blair to stand down. Brown had full knowledge of the plan, though wasn’t told the exact timings.

But when Balls walked into his room, brandishing Tom Watson’s letter to Blair, Brown was shocked. ‘F****** hell, are you sure that’s not going too far?’ he asked.

‘It’s too late,’ was Balls’s cold reply.

Finally, it is worth noting, although I do not really agree with such pop psychology, the authors’ considered verdict on Brown’s character:

In our view, Gordon Brown is the most damaged personality to have become chancellor or prime minister since World War II.

I would put it more simply: wholly unsuited to public office.

*Update: A friend points out that this is not entirely new. It is in The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley, p391, sourced to “Brown inner circle”: “The coup was not run by Gordon. It was run by Ed. Gordon was almost horrified when he realised how far it had gone.”