The shot putter’s final throw
After schools, houses, electoral reform and the future of the human race, it’s time for a bit of politics to finish off the week; time also for one of my famous incredibly contrived analogies. Gordon Brown is in the position of an Olympic shot putter who has had two no-throws.
At the beginning of the competition his supporters thought he was a real contender – that’s why he was selected. Now, given the performance so far of his main opponent in the competition, not many people think he can win. But he has to get his third round throw right or else he won’t even be there at the finish. Fortunately for him, he has conditions on his side.
OK, enough of the analogy. The bad news for Gordon Brown is that his ministers and MPs could still force a terminal leadership crisis in the autumn if things haven’t improved for Labour. By that time three aspects of the case made for the Prime Minister two weeks ago will have gone:
• The argument that a change of leadership will force an early election; GB himself will only have seven months left and a new leader could anyway say the first realistic time for an election would be spring
• The argument that better news on the economy will improve the polls will to some extent have been tested
• Those who turned against GB in the autumn could argue that they had stayed loyal for as long as could reasonably be asked.
But the good news for GB is that there are several reasons why his position may improve:
• MPs’ expenses will eventually stop being a big story
• There will be the steady flow of better economic news and international praise for his recession strategy
• Over the next two or three weeks the Government is unveiling several big policy statements with the aim of demonstrating it still has an agenda
• Governments generally improve their poll rating over the summer recess simply because people are in a good mood and are less likely to read newspapers or think about politics
• Labour conference will be a carefully choreographed pre-election rally
• And, finally, GB has his final Queen’s Speech to make commitments and draw dividing lines. He might still, for example, respond to growing public and cabinet pressure and pledge a polling day referendum on electoral reform.
So, all in all, the odds are on the veteran competitor throwing far enough to make the final. But he’ll stay nervous until he does, and, of course, making the final and winning it are two very, very different things.
Labour Party woes: only connect
On Friday the Observer asked me for 100 words on Labour’s problems. They only used the last forty, but this is what I sent:
‘ It’s easy to say what Labour needs to compete in the next election; signs of economic recovery, a compelling policy programme, credible dividing lines with the Conservatives. The political pendulum has swung several times over the last 2 years and the Conservatives still have some frayed edges. From where he is now any improvement could create momentum, but Gordon Brown’s biggest problem as a politician is how hard he finds it to relate to the public at large. Unless he can find a way to connect, it won’t matter what Labour’s message is it simply won’t get through.’
Behind all the talk of conspiracies and betrayal, Labour faces a simple dilemma. Gordon Brown is in some ways a very good leader and in other ways he is not. Arguably his greatest flaw is that the public find it very hard to relate to him; which for a politician is fairly fatal. To say that anyone who expresses this view is obsessed with personalities is a bit like criticising a modelling agency for being obsessed with looks.
Over ninety percent of human communication is non verbal. If this emotional communication is going wrong it gets in the way of the other 10%; the words themselves. For some reason our Prime Minister finds it very hard to get over this non verbal barrier. A friend once said something like this:
‘When I listen to Gordon Brown it reminds me of watching the weather forecast. It all sounds very clear and I think I am paying attention, but if at the end someone was to ask me if it was going to be sunny tomorrow in North Wales I wouldn’t have a clue.‘
This isn’t just about winning votes. Political leaders need to be able to appeal to our better nature, but to do that they must be able to form an emotional bond. I have argued before that the biggest challenge facing the political class as a whole is to get us, the people, to own the dilemmas facing the country; to stop making impossible demands (‘Swedish welfare on American taxes’ as pollster Ben Page says) and to recognise that we are all responsible for making a better future possible. This is as much an emotional appeal as a rational argument.
The Labour Party faces a very tough choice. In some ways its apparent willingness to stick with Gordon Brown despite his failings is commendable (the Conservatives have traditionally been more ruthless with their leaders) but for MPs and activists to ask for an urgent answer as to how the Prime Minister intends to overcome his demonstrable inability to connect is entirely reasonable.
The cabinet’s big gamble
Here, for what it’s worth, are my thoughts about this bizarre unfolding day of politics. First, expect the unexpected. Over the last two years no one predicted the huge swings of the political pendulum. Brown’s position was so strong in his first few months he nearly called an early election. He then went into free fall before starting to pull things back last autumn as the Conservative response to the credit crunch faltered. Then, in the last few weeks, in the wake of McBride and MPs’ expenses, Brown has taken Labour to new depths of support.
The last 24 hours are a microcosm of these wild swings. Listening to the radio last night after James Purnell’s resignation, the pundits were close to consensus that the game was up for the Prime Minister. But now with Miliband, Darling and Johnson safely ensconced in the big three jobs there is an emerging view that the Prime Minister may survive. Number Ten has a slew of major policy announcements on the stocks. Downing Street believes that if Brown can maintain sufficient momentum to get through the next few days his chances of making it to the general election are pretty good. But if this sounds like prediction, ignore it – the one thing we have learnt over the last two years is that political pundits are less reliable than horse racing tipsters.
My second point assumes Gordon Brown survives. He will then be able to rely on the total commitment and loyalty of his cabinet. Unlike almost everyone else, I try to take a charitable view of politicians. So, I assume that those ministers who have long had private criticisms of the Brown set-up have stayed in Government because they have changed their mind for strong substantive reasons. To be propping up a Prime Minister simply from inertia, fear or career calculation would be hard to defend. This implies the Cabinet must now be made up of people whose genuine political judgement it is that Grown Brown can defy the odds and come through next year, presumably by a combination of visionary new policy, economic recovery and drawing the dividing lines with the Conservatives.
Everyone in Labour ranks – including James Purnell – will hope those who have stayed have got it right, and given the swings of the last two years it is not inconceivable. But if they are wrong there will be nowhere to hide. After the Purnell resignation no one can say they didn’t have a choice.
So, on the one hand we have the possibility of another swing of the pendulum and the greatest political come back in modern Parliamentary history. On the other hand, if Gordon does stay and lose badly, Labour members could turn against the whole of its current leadership class. Few of the people then emerging as the architects of the post Blair-Brown Labour Party will be names widely recognised today.
Why our leaders may be making a bad situation worse
As if the daily revelations about MPs expenses weren’t enough, the way Gordon Brown and David Cameron have chosen to handle the affair guarantees it will have many more downhill twists. Running scared of the media and seeking political advantage, the leaders have tried to appear uncompromising in their condemnation of MPs accused of misdemeanours, and in their determination to act against wrong-doers.
In the face of what feels increasingly like a lynch mob public mentality, perhaps the leaders had no choice. But their tactics have ensured this story will move into a second and equally uncomfortable phase. This is when the Parties have to explain where and why they are drawing the lines between forgivable misjudgements, unforgivable extravagance or downright fiddling.
As we heard on the Today programme this morning, journalists will be on the look out for the line being drawn less on the basis of the acts committed than on the dispensability of the MP. Moral philosophers may want to think about media training; they will be in great demand to explain why a duck pond is intrinsically more objectionable that a plasma TV or top of the range soft furnishings.
The expenses story was bound to be hugely damaging and to say it could have been handled better is not to suggest it would, or should, have been an easy ride for MPs. But missing has been any narrative through which to confront MPs’ behaviour while resisting the myth that all Parliamentarians are greedy chancers who only ever got into politics to make a fast buck.
As ‘the only person in Britain still defending MPs’ I have previously offered one way of framing the scandal: over broadly the same period as the expenses system has taken up the slack between politicians’ and the public’s view of what our elected representatives are worth, MPs have seen a significant increase in their constituency workload. One measure is their expanding mailbag; MPs get three or four times as many letters (or e-mails) now as a generations ago. The expectations we place on MPs, – for example that each of them staff a full time local office and that each returns every week without fail to their constituency (Roy Jenkins used to go once a month to hold a surgery in the station hotel before heading back to town) – have changed without being understood or discussed, just as has the allowances system. We now need an open and thoughtful debate about what we want from MPs and what it is right to pay and reimburse them.
If our leaders had promoted understanding a bit more and condemnation a bit less they might have been able to draw on a distinction recently described by Michael Sandel. The renowned political philosopher was giving the first of his Reith lectures, recorded on Monday night and due for transmission in June. Sandel is concerned about how we frame public obligations, and particularly the way the criterion of economic efficiency trumps everything. He thinks this risks undermining vital social norms and replacing democratic discourse with crude cost benefit calculation His lecture cited an example beloved of behavioural economists; the Israeli nursery school which sought to stop parents picking up their children late by fining them. The unintended consequence was that many parents saw the fine as a fee and thus felt justified in coming even later.
The Professor offered his own example of this process. He used, he told us, to think of the extra money he had to pay Blockbusters when he returned DVDs late as a fine and something about which he ought to feel slightly guilty. But both he and the shop now saw the extra change as a fee with his decision to hold the DVD for a few extra days as being morally neutral.
This provides a clue as to why long standing MPs with an unblemished record of public service have come to behave like money-grubbing tricksters. The fatal ambiguity about the second home allowance was whether it was a form of compensation (something to which MPs were entitled as long as they could find some grounds) or an out of pocket expenses system from which people can only claim for clearly legitimate extra costs.
This is not an uncommon ambiguity. Take the provision many organizations have for people to claim lunch when they are out of the office. There is no reason why lunch out of town should cost you more than lunch bought at the sandwich shop round the corner from your workplace. But people claim on the implicit grounds that having your lunch bought is some recompense for the wear and tear of travelling.
Many MPs acted very unwisely. Some may have been deliberately dishonest. But I suspect that most simply made a category error – mistaking a provision for out of pocket expenses for an entitlement to compensation.
What it was in MPs’ attitudes and the culture of Parliament that allowed this disastrous error of judgement to take place is important. It is a pity we aren’t debating this rather than succumbing to the stupid and dangerous idea that one of the world’s strongest and cleanest democracies (albeit one that could do with some serious reform) is a den of venality and corruption.
MPs allowances: the dangers of winning, the virtues of clumsiness
There is one thing worse than losing a political argument: winning it. Given that all policy is seen to fail sooner or later, those who oppose an idea know it is only a matter of time before they can say ‘I told you so’. But the person who presses their case and wins runs the risk of being left the isolated scapegoat. In true ‘In the Loop’ fashion Whitehall insiders have their own version of an old saying: ‘success has many parents, but failure is a bastard’. I lost many arguments in my time at Number Ten, but if ever I thought I might win I made sure I wasn’t alone.
It is, I suspect, only a matter of time before we hear competing accounts of whose voice it was that last week piped up at Downing Street to suggest Gordon Brown intervene again in the MP’ allowances argument. Could it have been the same person who advocated the now shelved attendance allowance scheme and then went on to suggest the Prime Minister make his case on YouTube? If so they, like another unfortunate advisor, will soon find lifelong friends calling them by their surname (I had tea last week with an ex-Treasury civil servant who giggled uncontrollably each time he found an excuse to refer to ‘Mr McBride’).
By the way, while we are on the YouTube debacle I can’t resist repeating Catherine Bennett’s brilliant description of Gordon Brown ‘giving the impression of an unusually intelligent alien who has made a careful study of human beings, without ever having had the opportunity to meet one’.
On the substantive issue I refer back to an earlier post, offering a cultural theory explanation for the ‘clumsy’ system of MPs’ allowances. I made the point that there is no neat solution to MPs’ remuneration that doesn’t create new problems of its own. Oh, if only Number Ten read my blog, how much embarrassment they could have avoided!
The irony of all the talk of new systems is that the present arrangements are, I suspect, only one small reform from being workable, and this reform is about to be implemented. As the Scottish system shows, making all expense claims immediately transparent largely takes the heat out of the issue; for two reasons. On the one hand, all but the most shameless MPs avoid making claims that will bring them into disrepute. On the other, the fact that the claims are publicly available takes away the journalists’ ability to ‘expose’ the information in a sensationalist way.
One of the perils of policy making – and dangers of political hubris – is overturning a whole system when minor reforms could have the desired effect (did someone say ‘Frank Dobson and the NHS internal market?’). There is no popular way to pay MPs – as Rachel Sylvester argues cogently, this reflects a deeper malaise in political discourse - but the present system plus transparency may well be the best we can realistically manage. Not that I’d want to be the one who tells Gordon!
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