“Americans do it clean, Britons do it dirty,” says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Americans have term limits on high office; contestants fight to known rules. They say who they are and what they represent, then the people decide. In Britain, for the second time in just over a year, we have to “contemplate a small political club choosing a new ruler without so much as a passing reference to the electorate”.
Last week, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, put himself forward as a potential challenger to Gordon Brown after outlining his manifesto in The Guardian and refusing to rule out a bid to oust the Prime Minister. Miliband has erected a “neon sign flashing to his party and the country that Brown needs to be removed and he is ready to replace him”, says Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer.
Maybe, says The Daily Telegraph. But Brown’s position is secure until the next general election. The “Labour Party’s constitution makes the removal of a sitting prime minister, without his consent, fiendishly difficult”. In this context, Downing Street’s reaction to the leadership threat has been “maladroit”. Wheeling out three Cabinet ministers to voice support and launching a witch-hunt for the ten supposedly dissident ministers ready to force a leadership contest this autumn looks desperate. Brown should just rise above it all.
The Blairites have “obviously lost control of their senses”, says Clare Short in The Independent. All they’ve done is create division that will make Labour’s defeat even worse. Miliband has made no changes to the foreign policy that made Blair so “profoundly unpopular” in Britain. His lack of executive skills make him unsuitable for the highest office, says Jenkins. He is a “think tanker” who has never shown much understanding of how to make an organisation deliver his ideas. The political content of his article was “near zero”: an “intellectual morass of ‘not yielding to fatalism’, being ‘humble about shortcomings’ and ‘sharing a restlessness for change’”.
“No cabinet minister has publicly cheeked the PM” like this and kept his job, says Bruce Anderson in The Independent. Brown “ought to come out clunking” and fire Miliband and anyone who follows his example. This is “political insanity”: most voters share two wise prejudices. “First, they distrust divided parties. If you cannot agree among themselves, why should we listen to any of you?” Second, they dislike leaders who cannot impose their authority. “If your colleagues do not respect you, why should we?”
Brown has left if too late, says Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. No one listens to a leader once 85% of people decide he is ‘not up to the job’, as this week’s YouGov poll shows. Miliband’s article has injected a shot of optimism into the Labour Party; Britain faces tough times and Labour needs a leader who can make the social-democratic case with powerful clarity. “September will prove the mettle of the cabinet, the pluck or cowardice of individual ministers to seize one last chance.”