What use is Gordon Brown?

What use is Gordon Brown? And how the PM can avert a landslide defeat in 2010 

This blog isn’t just another exercise in kicking a prime minister while he’s down – the acidic Christopher Hitchens has done that far more eloquently than I ever could in Vanity Fair – but to suggest a diagnosis, and possible cure, for his political ills.

Obviously a man of Brown’s hefty physical presence would make a superb draught excluder but, if he wants to stay in 10 Downing Street, he needs to change the narrative of his premiership.

‘Change the narrative’ sounds poncy doesn’t it? But there is a point to the pretension. At the moment, the spinmeisters selling Brown have developed a curious strategy in which the prime minister behaves like a serial bandwagon jumper, oozing sympathy over “Jane Goodie” (as he once unfortunately dubbed her) one minute and orating, a bit stiffly, to YouTube the next.

It is always dangerous to generalise but I suspect that, like me, voters weighing their intentions ahead of the great day of electoral reckoning next May, might be more interested in the prime minister’s vision of the future of Britain than his insight into the tragic death of a reality TV star.

The few political leaders who are remembered with any residual fondness or admiration had the useful knack of making their personal ambition seem to serve the national purpose, implying that their rise up the greasy pole was intimately connected to the renewal of the country they led, and inviting us to share in the burdens and benefits of that renewal. In this way, they suggested that their narrative, if you like, was our narrative too.

American presidents are especially good at this. Lincoln devoted his presidency – and gave his life – to the cause of keeping the American states united. Franklin Roosevelt offered voters a New Deal, JFK invited them to explore a New Frontier and even Ronald Reagan offered a vision of a sunnier, more self-confident America, even though he drew on the moral certainties only usually found in a particular kind of Hollywood movie. 

In an ultra-cynical world, many pundits assumed that this kind of pitch could never work again but, most recently, Obama’s election-winning slogan that “change is coming to America” was epic, snappy and usefully ambiguous. 

Prime ministers have been less consistent at this kind of linkage. Winston Churchill, like Lincoln, found his mission in extreme crisis. Lloyd George and Clement Attlee promised a land fit for the heroes who had just won a war. Margaret Thatcher, like Reagan, offered a new society built on old certainties. New Labour wasn’t just the reinvention of a party but, Tony Blair convinced many for a year or three, the necessary precursor of a cooler, fairer society. Even Harold Wilson, by using phrases such as the “white hot heat of technology”, managed to suggest that dear old Blighty was about to be modernised. A bit. 

But Gordon Brown’s marketers have allowed his premiership to become defined solely by one issue: the exercise and maintenance of his power. He has sometimes hinted at broader agendas – as an amateur policy wonk I got irrationally excited when he talked about the need for constitutional reform when Expensegate was at its bizarre, baffling height – but never with enough consistency to suggest a deeply held personal belief that is the cornerstone of a political philosophy that might improve the state of our nation, the quality of our daily lives and our confidence in our collective future.

Bobby Kennedy famously said that “One fifth of the people are against everything all of the time”. Rather than pandering to the phone-in merchants, the green ink brigade (or their email-savvy heirs) and Britain’s moronic variations of the Howard Stern shock jock, Brown should clearly articulate what kind of Britain he would like us all to live in and how he proposes to create such a society.

Such speeches might not win the election. But they would change the political battleground. 

Modern elections can become a referendum about political ideology (1945, 1964, 1979, 1997) or managerial competence (1974, 1983, 1992). As the premier and, before that, chancellor who had the misfortune (I’m not exculpating him from all blame, just pointing that the credit crunch wasn’t – as the Daily Mail would have us believe – entirely his fault) to be in power when the worst recession for 70 years struck, he is doomed to lose any campaign where the central issue is competence. His best – no, make that only – hope is to convince the electorate that his values are closer to theirs than the leader of the opposition’s. 

What about it Gordon?