Brown must relive Blair's nightmare
Monday April 14 2008
Gordon Brown will be competing with the Pope for headlines in Washington this week. But these days the last thing that Brown needs is media attention.
His fellow cabinet ministers are getting seriously worried about his state of mind. They fear he is suffering from acute depression and that he lacks the 'resilience gene' which enabled Tony Blair to bounce back time after time after his numerous political reverses.
Put the words 'Gordon Brown Dither' into Google, the internet search facility, and you will get 17,800 references.
That's an arithmetical measure of the way Brown has gained a reputation during the nine months of his premiership.
The opinion polls provide an even starker mathematical guide to the plunge in Brown's fortunes since last summer. They show his popularity has collapsed at the fastest rate ever recorded.
The immediate beneficiary of this abrupt decline is David Cameron, the Conservative leader.
But Cameron has his problems as well. Much of his lead in the polls is due to the simple fact that he is not Brown. He and his shadow chancellor, George Osborne, have failed to convince voters that they have a plausible plan for restoring the UK's economy to buoyancy.
The most effective opposition to the government, in fact, is now to be found in the law courts where Brown has suffered a series of disastrous setbacks in the past week alone. High court judges have overturned his key policies on immigration, and they have also condemned government efforts to suppress criticism of failings by the Ministry of Defence.
But by far the biggest blow to Brown and the integrity of the entire Labour administration has been administered by two High Court judges who savagely criticised the controversial decision to drop a corruption inquiry into the sale of billions of pounds worth of military aircraft and equipment to Saudi Arabia. While the decision to drop the inquiry was taken by the Serious Fraud Office, there is little doubt that it was Tony Blair, the prime minister at the time, who let it be known that the inquiry had to be stopped.
The UK has very few large, successful industries nowadays and the thought of decimating the activities of BAE was a nightmare for Blair. Now it is Brown's turn to relive that nightmare.
- Nicholas Leonard
