‘He Goes Or The Party Dies’

Talk about gallows humor. One Thursday morning in July, a small group of M.P.s trooped into 10 Downing Street for breakfast with the prime minister in the Cabinet Room. Crashing in the polls, Gordon Brown had invited them as part of a series of morale-boosting get-togethers. Before Brown arrived—looking "awful," his fingernails chewed to the quick, one of his visitors recalls—a couple of Brown's guests, like puckish schoolboys on a museum tour, paused by a gleaming ceremonial sword displayed on a side table. "Do you think somebody put it there," one whispered to the other, "just in case he wants to, you know, do himself in?"

It's gotten that bad for Brown. The former chancellor of the Exchequer's reputation for economic competence has been erased by bad economic news and forecasts of slower growth and rising unemployment. A Scotsman, he has led Labour to a string of embarrassing electoral defeats, most recently this July in the former party stronghold of Glasgow East, his home ground. His plodding ways at a time of a worsening international credit crunch and disenchantment at home after more than 11 years of Labour rule are killing his party in the polls. According to one newspaper analysis, the party is destined to lose nearly half its seats in the next national election, its worst showing since 1935.

Brown may not even make it that far. An increasingly serious plot to unseat him has electrified British politics—all the more so because allies of former prime minister Tony Blair are rallying behind another potential boy wonder, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, in an endeavor to save the party. The betting among M.P.s and political professionals is that there's a 50-50 chance Brown will not last out the year. The case against Brown is "pure and simple," said one angry M.P., who like others in this saga spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter. "Either he goes or the party dies."

In a parliamentary system like Britain's, a prime minister can fall at astonishing speed. Recall that Margaret Thatcher was toppled in 1990 less than a month after the resignation of a key cabinet minister over policy differences. Now London papers are full of reports of ministerial resignations, and three M.P.s who were cabinet members under Blair—Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers and Charles Clarke—have publicly criticized Brown for nudging Labour to the left and shying away from some of the more radical free-market reforms.

Even if Brown, 57, hangs on until the last possible date for a general election, June 3, 2010, it appears that the Blair-Brown era of British politics is drawing to a close. The Conservative Party has recovered from more than a decade in the political wilderness, and now looks likely to return to power under the fresh leadership of David Cameron, 41. Meanwhile, a new, younger generation of Labour politicians will have to resolve the tensions between the Brownite wing and the now emboldened Blairites. The party is split along a left-right divide. Blair was unabashedly pro-business and anti-union; he enjoyed the support of organized labor only because it had no other party to turn to. Brown's policy instincts are more traditionally to the left of Blair's. Furthermore, because Labour is deep in debt and weaker politically than it was during the early Blair years, it is, under Brown, depending more and more on its union allies for financial support. Labour's next generation will have to address the debilitating left-right fissure if the party is to move forward once again.

Miliband is the unofficial leader of the Blairite rebellion. He once headed Blair's policy unit at No. 10, spearheading reforms that Brown, as chancellor, sometimes sought to block. At the end of July, Miliband wrote an article in The Guardian setting out his vision for Labour's credo and his critique of Cameron. He defined Labour doctrine as he would like to see it ("a political creed … combining government action and personal freedom") and made a lucid attack on Cameron as "a politician of the status quo" (unlike Thatcher, "he is a conservative, not a radical. He doesn't share a restlessness for change. He may be likable and sometimes hard to disagree with, but he is empty").