Llewellyn

King

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December 10, 2007

Gordon Brown’s Cold and Lonely World as Britain’s Prime Minister

The British Labor Party, which under Prime Minister Tony Blair provided such amazing support to President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, was recreated by three men in the early 1990s. Until recently, they called it “New Labor” because it bore so little resemblance to the ramshackle socialist party that had existed for a century.

The men who created New Labor were Blair; Gordon Brown, the current British prime minister; and Peter Mandelson, the current European Union trade commissioner. Of the three, Blair was the front man – personable, witty, non-threatening and lightening fast on his feet. Brown was the intellectual heavyweight – the brilliant son of a Scottish minister who was accepted by the University of Edinburgh to study history at age 16. Mandelson was the visionary – the Karl Rove. They dubbed their plan to bring the Labor Party out from under its trade union dominance “The Project.”

Now their project is in trouble. Blair has gone on to other things. Mandelson has been diminished in public life by scandal. And Brown is stumbling.

Today, Brown's problems are many and they are mounting. They also owe quite a bit to Blair's offhand style of leadership – his habit of initiating projects and not completing them – and to a rift that developed early on between Brown and Mandelson. Blair always benefited from Mandelson's ability to sense the political mood. But Brown seems unable to sense it, and has no one to do it for him.

Like many brilliant men, Brown neither seeks nor takes counsel well. As such, he was ill-prepared for his late-July meeting with Bush at Camp David. He did not listen to the political professionals and call an election to validate his leadership. He has not told the British people what he is going to do about Britain's relationship with Europe. And he has left open the thorny issue of the future of the House of Lords. Blair talked about a plebiscite on Europe and did not deliver one, and he evicted hereditary nobles from the House of Lords, but failed to introduce a plan for its future.

On other matters, Brown's government has been inept. It is widely criticized for its handling of the failure of Northern Rock, a mortgage bank. Worse, almost comically, the social security records of almost half of Britain's population have been lost, because they were saved onto discs and committed to interoffice mail. It is a giant embarrassment.

All this takes place against the background of what may be the last decades of the United Kingdom. Three hundred years ago, Scotland was coerced into union with England. Now there is evidence, abetted by Blair's devolution of power to a Scottish assembly, that Scotland will not rest until it is a free country. The last Conservative prime minister, John Major, repeatedly warned Blair that the creation of a Scottish assembly would lead to the end of the union, but Blair persisted.

In England, there is little interest in Scotland. And in Scotland, there is a great sense of aggrievement. Brown is talking up Britishness, but the people are talking up their Scottishness, their Englishness and to a lesser extent their Welshness and their Cornishness.

Brown must rue the fact that he did not become prime minister in 1997 – that he bowed to pressure from Blair and Mandelson and had to wait 10 long years before taking up the reins of government. Blair could always pick up the telephone and have a cheery conversation with his buddy Bush across the Atlantic. It is not clear that Brown has any political buddies with whom he has cheery conversations.

Meanwhile, the British media discuss plots in Westminster to remove Brown, exult in his difficulties and watch the narrow gap that now exists between Brown and his presumptive opponent in an election, Conservative David Cameron.

It is alleged – and has never been confirmed or denied – that at a dinner at the Granita restaurant in London, at the outset of The Project, Blair, Brown and Mandelson decided that Blair would be prime minister first and that Brown would succeed him. Brown may now wish that he had declined that dinner invitation in May 1994, and insisted on being the first of New Labor's prime ministers.

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