TMP Online

TMP regular, Tim Caswell, contemplates Gordon Brown’s overtures to the Lib Dems and the end of the road for the Labour deputy leadership contest.

For the second time in a generation, Labour party members and supporters woke up this week to the news that a new Labour Leader had been planning to offer Cabinet posts to the Liberal Democrats.

Tony Blair’s predictable attempt to realign the left with Paddy Ashdown fell foul of a large landslide and even larger temper belonging to his Deputy, John Prescott, in 1997.

This week’s invitation to Paddy Ashdown to become Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was vetoed by Sir Menzies Campbell, the man Ashdown quaintly calls his “Commanding Officer”. It will also have come as a complete shock to the vast majority of Labour members, whose support has made Brown’s coronation on Sunday possible.

To both the minority - who welcome this as proof positive that Brown is both his own man and more pluralistic than anyone imagined - and the implacable majority, this will induce feelings that a proper leadership contest would have shed more light on the man who has brooded so long in the shadows and on the direction in which he intends to lead Labour, the Government and the nation.

Has the deputy leadership contest offered any substitute for this process? No, not fully, because all of the candidates are themselves restricted by the parameters of their perception of the Brown project and the need to be loyal to the leader-elect. I wonder if any of the candidates knew that overtures were to be made to Campbell and friends and, if they didn’t, who in the Labour Party did? More importantly, who will be the victor, and will they ever have the same influence over Brown that Prescott apparently wielded over Blair the last time Paddy nearly got his hands on a ministerial red box?

An unholy trinity of pollsters, political pundits and bookmakers now make Hilary Benn the favourite for the role. Those who think comparisons between Mr. Benn and his father are off limits have perhaps missed the three videos showing them deep in conversation together on Mr Benn’s website. But the most profound political comparison is that between the current contest for deputy leader and that when Tony Benn stood in 1981.

That contest, against Dennis Healey, heralded the outbreak of Labour’s civil war and nearly two decades of Conservative hegemony during which Labour nearly came third in a general election to the Social Democratic Party. It was Labour’s darkest hour!

During that era, Militant Tendency (also known as the Revolutionary Socialist League) stood a member of their central committee under the Labour banner for Parliament and gave Bradford North its first ever Tory MP. For anyone doubting that Red Fascism exists, I recommend Michael Crick’s book MILITANT. Mr Benn senior opposed their expulsion and it took Messrs Kinnock, Mandelson, Brown and Blair to drag Labour kicking and screaming into the middle of the last century.

Memories of that contest and the divisions it created still reverberate across two and a half decades. Neil Kinnock’s abstention, as Benn lost by less than 1%, to Dennis Healy, was a seminal moment in the birth of New Labour. I wonder if memories of, “Benn, Harman, Johnson, Cruddas, Hain and Blears” will enjoy the same longevity?

This campaign has seemed to go on forever and so might the count; election by Single Transferable Vote is not for the politically faint-hearted or people who like an early night. Professor Phillip Cowley has predicted that this one will be decided after a third or possibly fourth round, which means that the candidate who is least unpopular is most likely to win.

If it were a First-Past-the-Post election, a system so unfair that we save it for General Elections, Benn might still come up on the rails to win, having only secured just enough nominations from his fellow MP’s to make the starting post. But, it is his lack of unpopularity that makes him the strongest contender under STV.

Peter Hain, an early favourite, is flagging but attracting strong union support. Alan Johnson, an ex-postman and Trade Union leader, is living proof that Prescott’s law of linguistics (that all working class politicians are strangers to the mysteries of English grammar and syntax) is nonsense. Conclusive proof of this is also provided by Jon Cruddas, a working class intellectual who mentions Schumpeter in his speeches and attracts the support of clever people like Compass members and TMP editor, Chuka Umunna, for his trouble. If this were an intellectual beauty contest, Mr Cruddas would be the thinking person’s crumpet and win. It isn’t, so sadly he won’t.

Hazel Blears describes herself as an optimist. She has to be, she is running for deputy leader but her Salford constituency is disappearing. She might be joining the grass roots rather than representing them. More important she is a new Labour loyalist, which will be enough to put her closest to being on the wrong side of Professor Cowley’s “least unpopular” equation.

That leaves Harriet Harman who has had a brilliant campaign and makes the rare claim that she gets on well with Gordon Brown. Is this because she shares his latent Stalinism? In her campaign letter to Party members she wrote, “We must never be in opposition again!”.

Add to the complexities of STV the labyrinthine complexity of Labour’s Electoral College, in which party members, MP’s and the unions share the vote equally, and you have a virtual lottery. If your name is G Brown you may have at least three votes and you still don’t have to give the winner the job of Deputy Prime Minister.

But the real winner is the Labour Party. The reason that Professor Cowley’s equation is harder to solve than a Rubik’s cube, is that none of the candidates are unpopular. They all deserve credit for their conduct during the election, which brings us back to the Cabinet.

All six will play an important part in what Gordon Brown hopes will be the biggest comeback since Lazarus. They should all star in the new Cabinet. Now that the Lib Dems have declined to participate in what the corporate world dismiss as a “Muppet shuffle” there will be more room at the cabinet table. Over to you, Mr. Brown?

Tim Caswell is a Labour Party member of over 30 years standing and a writer.