Gordon Brown is unfit for the highest office, said Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express. One opinion poll this week gave Brown a negative rating of minus 37 points, worse than the minus 21 awarded to the “widely despised” Neville Chamberlain on the eve of his departure from Downing Street in May 1940 – and it is no wonder British voters are “repelled by what they see”.
Brown is “an insecure Stalinist who worships power but cannot take a decision” and a “political coward” who tries to fill the “vacuum at the heart of his leadership with blustering rhetoric and adolescent bullying”. His own troops are recoiling, said James Chapman in the Daily Mail. He has come under fire from prominent MPs including Labour’s Ian Gibson, who likened him to a “scared rabbit in the headlights”, and researchers said this week that Brown has faced more Parliamentary rebellions than any other post-war premier – 66 in ten months.
With Brown at the helm the whole New Labour project has “imploded”, said Melanie Phillips, also in the Daily Mail. Whatever Brown touches collapses in “ignominy or worse”: Northern Rock, the embryo bill, breaking his manifesto promise over the EU referendum, punishing the poor by abolishing the 10p tax band. “The political charge-sheet is lengthening by the day.” The economy is the issue that is damaging him most, said Philip Webster in The Daily Telegraph, but the rows over MPs expenses, capital gains tax, non-doms and the lost data discs have all eroded his credibility.
The fiasco of the “election that never was” last autumn only compounded Brown’s weakness, said Brian Wilson, also in The Daily Telegraph. By failing to legitimise his accession, he remains a prime minister who was “allotted” rather than elected. As for those who maintained that Brown simply needed time to set out his vision, their credibility is gone, said Jenni Russell in The Guardian. After a year, even those who hoped he had hidden depths have had to conclude that he’s a “man of hidden shallows”.
So what now? Amid ferocious turf wars and talk of “tears, tantrums and screaming matches” between rival factions (Brown is said to have hurled three mobile phones at a wall in one week), there’s “feverish talk” of stalking horses and leadership contests, said Phillips. The key date is said to be the local elections on 1 May. If Labour loses hundreds of seats to the Tories and if Ken Livingstone loses the mayoral contest to Boris Johnson, then “Brown will be levered out”. But who could replace him? David Miliband is too “callow”, James Purnell “too shallow”, Jack Straw is “yesterday’s man” and Charles Clarke the “day before yesterday’s man”.
It won’t come to that, said Webster. In spite of all the criticism, Labour MPs will “sink or swim” with Brown at the next general election. There is no obvious successor and the Labour party knows that “divided parties lose elections”. But with Brown at the helm, Labour’s chances of winning the next election are “negligible”, said John Rentoul in The Independent on Sunday.
David Miliband is Labour’s only hope, and he should be setting out his stall for the future now, because Brown’s premiership will “implode amazingly quickly”. These things do – Margaret Thatcher went from “unassailable” to out in six months. Miliband is the only candidate with the poise, the communication skills and “just enough experience at the highest level” to put Labour back in the running.