‘He Goes Or The Party Dies’

In the view of many M.P.s, including even some of his own supporters, Brown has not been able to articulate a vision of what he and Labour stand for, nor has he mounted such a coherent criticism of the Tory opposition. Instead, he seems to favor staccato announcements and reannouncements of initiatives and reviews over a clear and overarching political message. But it was the fact that Miliband didn't once mention Brown's name that was interpreted—correctly, according to sources close to Miliband—as an attack on Brown and a bid by Miliband to replace him as party leader. (Speaking of coded messages, you'll find the 43-year-old Miliband in Facebook, with the famous No. 10 door as the backdrop to his profile photo. Cheeky, as the Brits say.)

Miliband was not acting alone. It's apparent from the language of his piece that Phil Collins, a former speechwriter for Blair and a veteran of think tanks that were incubators of Blairite thinking, had a hand in it. In June Collins had helped to write another critique of the Tories (titled "Radicals or Conservatives?") by James Purnell, a 38-year-old former special adviser to Blair who is now secretary of state for Work and Pensions in the Brown government. Along with a growing contingent of Blairite M.P.s, a number of other Blair-era aides are reported to be informally advising Miliband, including Peter Hyman, another former speechwriter, and D. J. Collins, a former Whitehall special adviser.

Blair himself has scrupulously avoided any connection to plots against Brown. He's kept busy with the work of his various foundations and his role as special Middle East envoy for the Quartet, the foursome made up of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. But recently a memo came to light in which Blair analyzed Brown's spectacular drop in popularity after last year's Labour Party Conference. In the memo, written last autumn but leaked to a newspaper in early August, Blair criticizes the "hubris and vacuity" of the Labour conference, and complains that Brown "junked" the Blair "policy agenda but had nothing to put in its place." Perhaps most cruelly, Blair dismisses Brown's ability to fix what's wrong. "I am passing this message on to G.B.—not in these terms—and will try to help; but at present, there is every indication that the lessons will not be learnt."

Brown won't be easy to force out. He spent a two-week holiday on the Suffolk coast devising new policy initiatives and public-relations strategies. He reportedly hired a personal trainer to help get him fit for the brewing fight. Over the coming weeks, Brown will throw the full weight of his government behind what amounts to a personal rescue operation. The word is out that the government may suspend the "stamp duty" tax of 1 percent on residential home purchases below £250,000. With fuel prices as high as they are—gasoline sells for £1.23 per liter—he may offer some people price breaks. He will probably reshuffle his cabinet in early September.

Bold personnel changes could demonstrate strength, dominate the news for a while, entrench his supporters and possibly even straitjacket some rivals in the cabinet, like Miliband, by keeping them busy with new jobs. Brown will then briefly transplant the entire cabinet from Whitehall to well outside London to try to show he hasn't lost touch with the people. Finally, though showmanship has never been his forte, he will use the party conference and his big speech there to try to relaunch himself and his government by pledging, among other things, to steer Britain safely through troubled economic waters.

But at some level Brown must know that there is very little he can do to satisfy the members of the unofficial Dump Gordon movement. They bitterly resented his involvement in the "coup" against Blair two years ago. They also complain that Brown, as chancellor, thwarted some of Blair's public-service reforms that were more market-oriented than Brown would have liked. Indeed, they blame Brown, along with the costly and unpopular war in Iraq, for many of the perceived shortcomings of Blair's years in office. In their view, Brown—politically to the left of Blair, harboring a grudge against him over the leadership showdown between them many years ago, a man once described by a Blair aide as "psychologically flawed"—was bound not only to play a role in Blair's undoing but also to make a poor prime minister.

Still, it would be wrong to see the drama unfolding this summer as being all about the past—as a vainglorious refighting of the Blair-Brown feud that consumed so much time and energy during Blair I, II and III, and now Brown I. The more important battle concerns the nature of the Labour Party after Blair and Brown are both gone and the Conservative Party readies itself for power once again. "For the Labour Party to have a future, it has to overcome the gulf of the past," says a source close to Miliband. Whether Miliband is the one to breach the chasm remains an open question. But whoever does it and whenever it is done, Gordon Brown will have to get out of the way first.

© 2008