Honeymoon Ends Early
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Fortune favors the brave, as Virgil said, but to those who hesitate, she is merciless. In one week, Gordon Brown has used up 20 years of carefully accumulated political credit. Not only is his honeymoon with the voters over; they are already filing for divorce.
A prime minister of Britain has three constitutional advantages over a president of America. First, he or she is not only head of the executive branch but also the leader of the majority party in the legislature, which makes it much easier to turn policies into law. Second, he or she is not limited to two terms of office, as every president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been: both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in recent times had three. Third, he or she can choose when to call an election, though parliaments in peacetime cannot last longer than five years, there are no fixed terms, and the prime minister can ask the Queen to dissolve parliament at any time.
This last constitutional power is, of course, double-edged: most governments go through a mid-term phase of unpopularity, and prime ministers who exercise their right to call an early election often have been punished at the ballot box. What makes Prime Minister Brown unusual, if not unique, in his political ineptitude is that he is now being punished for not calling a snap election.
At the beginning of last week, Mr. Brown was sitting pretty: Both he and his party were far ahead of his Tory opponents, led by the much less experienced David Cameron, in popularity. The countdown to a November election had begun, and it looked like a foregone conclusion.
But Mr. Brown yielded to the temptation to take the verdict of the electorate for granted. He played party politics with the national interest, by making a flying visit to Iraq, in order to upstage the Conservatives, gathered for their annual conference in Blackpool. He cynically announced that several units that had not yet been sent to Iraq would be brought home. This rank opportunism left the public angry, but nothing deterred Mr. Brown — a machine politician without much imagination — from doggedly continuing to prepare for an election. This had the effect of uniting the normally disputatious Tories, whose minds were wonderfully concentrated by the prospect of a fourth successive defeat.
With his back against the wall, Mr. Cameron gave the speech of his life: For more than an hour, live, without notes, without autocue, he talked about what he believed and why he would be different from Mr. Brown. And people liked what they saw. They liked the fact that, for the first time, he sounded like a Conservative. He promised tax cuts, and, in particular, to raise the threshold of inheritance tax so that only millionaires would pay it. He offered to restore tax breaks for married couples, so that women who gave up work to raise children would receive some fiscal compensation. In short, he shed his image as a slick, preppy yuppie, too privileged and too unprincipled to be trusted. He looked instead like a regular guy who cared about ordinary people.
It was enough. By last weekend, the polling evidence showed that the public mood had turned against Mr. Brown, who emerged from his lair to announce that there would not, after all, be an election this year — or, most probably, next year either. He made things worse by pretending that he would not have called an election even if he had been sure of a big majority.
Then, on Tuesday, his right-hand man, Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, delivered a budget speech that stole all the Tory ideas but contrived to be downbeat, because the public finances are in a mess.
Finally, yesterday, Mr. Brown stood eyeball to eyeball with Mr. Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions. There is no more unforgiving arena than the House of Commons, and the ministers on the front bench fell silent while the Tories ridiculed Mr. Brown for losing his nerve — or “bottle.” Mr. Cameron tore what was left of the hapless Mr. Brown’s authority to shreds, taunting him as a “phoney” who was trying to make fools of the voters and challenging him to pluck up courage to ask the Queen for a dissolution of parliament. “Never before has a prime minister treated the British people with such cynicism,” he declared. Mr. Brown looked like a man who had not only lost his bottle but the plot, too.
For the first time, it is dawning on the Labor Party that driving Tony Blair into premature retirement just might not have been such a great idea. They have exchanged a leader who was charismatic, eloquent, politically astute, and, above all, brave for one who we already knew was arrogant, remote, disloyal, and dull, but who we now know is also a coward. It was typical of Mr. Brown’s pettiness that he could hardly bring himself to pay tribute to his predecessor in office at the Labor Conference in Bournemouth two weeks ago. But the British electorate voted for Mr. Blair three times; they have yet to vote for Mr. Brown.
During the period until an election, Mr. Cameron now has a chance to grow in stature and above all to develop a proper policy towards the jihad. Last week he made a start by promising to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, the global Islamist party that supports the aims of Al Qaeda but is still legal in Britain and active on many campuses. But his chief foreign policy adviser is the former Foreign Office mandarin Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, known as “Neville Chamberlain” by her critics, whose defeatist attitude is entirely unhelpful.
Still, this was the week when British politics began to be interesting again for the first time since Mr. Blair left the stage, and this column will follow the drama as it unfolds.