The Blairites strike back

For Gordon Brown, the brief truce is over. I don’t mean the truce with the Tories, but with the Blairites. Ever since Brown took their man’s job, they’ve been circling warily, not daring to strike while he looked strong, but waiting, like vultures, until he looked wounded.

When he ruled out an early election, for the first time, he looked vulnerable, and they pounced. A brave and decisive leader (read Tony Blair) would have seized the moment and held an election. A principled leader (read Tony Blair) would have known that an early election was just crass opportunism, and ruled it out weeks earlier. (Consistency has never been their strongest suit.)

It’s back to the days before it became obvious that neither Alan Milburn nor Charles Clarke, nor anyone else among those whose hatred of Brown now defines their other politics, could mount a credible challenge for the top job. The days when Brown had “psychological flaws” (remember those?) and when the ideal leader was a mythical character whose existence I revealed for the first time in my Gordon Brown, Past, Present and Future, called Notgordon Brown. (“Who do you want for leader?” “Notgordon Brown.”)

What they really hold against Brown is that somewhere deep inside him, though pretty well disguised by now, he still thinks that the purpose of Labour politics is to fight for the underdog.

The weekend was vicious. It was as though the Blairites fanned out all over London to make sure no one missed the message that Brown was a dangerous lunatic who bit his fingernails and kicked the furniture. “He knows he’s not fit for the job, but he was too vain not to do it” someone close to the Blair circle told me at a party, before regaling me with a story about how he recently grabbed BBC political editor Nick Robinson by the lapels and threw him against the wall. (No, I don’t believe it either.)

In public, the Daily Mail ran lurid tales about Brown’s alleged hysteria, put together from conversations with Blairites by Anthony Seldon, author of a sycophantic Blair biography. Lord Falconer talked about how the government was “drifting” (I’m not sure what a drifting government looks like, but it sounds nasty) and the Clarkes, Mandelsons and Milburns were huffing about the things they might say soon; what they are as yet they know not but they will be the terrors of the earth.

But most deadly of all was Blair himself. Naturally he isn’t going to get down in the dirt, not while he’s got the likes of Falconer to do it for him, but he knows where the jugular is. To the cheers of the most influential people in New York, he said – the words bear no other interpretation - that Iran was the new Nazi Germany, and it is as dangerous to appease it as it was to appease Hitler.

Iran today – in strength, in ideology, in stated intentions – doesn’t look at all like Germany in the thirties. To say it does is as foolish and dangerous as Anthony Eden saying in 1956 that President Nasser of Egypt was the new Hitler, and leading Britain into the most disastrous and misconceived war in modern times until Blair’s Iraq adventure.

One of the reasons Blair had to resign before he was pushed is that Labour didn’t trust him not to follow Iraq by war with Iran. Brown’s living, waking nightmare is that George Bush, in a last act of presidential hubris, is going to attack Iran – or, even worse, that a successor will be elected who will do so. The president will ask Brown for support. Brown (I think) will say no. Brown (I hope) may even speak out against it. He may already have made his position privately clear to Bush, and if so, Bush will have told Blair.

By speaking as he did, Blair is deliberately weakening his successor’s hand with the USA if that moment comes. He is also preparing the ground for the Blairites to turn on Brown at that moment and tear him to pieces. Thus will the next election be lost, and a Conservative government elected which will be obliged to mend the transatlantic alliance by a display of utter servility. Blair’s task will then be done.