Here We Go Again?

A prime minister and his chancellor of the Exchequer are at odds. Sound familiar? I’ll come back to that.

Tony Blair’s ten years in office were marked by a running feud with Gordon Brown. Never calm, their relationship was described as everything from a bad marriage to a blood feud. It was such a never-ending soap opera that it became known by an acronym: the TBGB’s. One question in particular poisoned their relationship: when would Blair make good on his promise to turn power over to Brown, as Brown had given way for Blair when the party leadership opened up in 1994? Never was the feud hotter than in 2006, when Brown let run a rift in the Labour party that eventually forced Blair to announce that he would leave office the following year. At the time the left-wing Labour M.P John McDonnell said, “Most of us have looked on aghast. It’s almost been like an episode of ‘The Sopranos’.”

In recent weeks, there’s been a growing buzz in London that Brown and his chancellor, Alistair Darling, aren’t seeing eye to eye. First, Darling subtly but persistently seemed to be encouraging his boss to bow to public pressure and apologize for not foreseeing the financial crisis when it was brewing years ago. “The key thing that went wrong was that a culture was allowed to develop over the last 15 years or so where the relationship between what people did and what they got went way out of alignment, especially at the top end,” Darling said at one point. “If there is a fault, it is our collective responsibility. All of us have to have the humility to accept that over the last few years, things got out of alignment.”

Finally today an apology of sorts by Brown appears in the Guardian: “I take full responsibility for all my actions, but I think we’re dealing with a bigger problem that is global in nature, as well as national. Perhaps 10 years ago after the Asian crisis when other countries thought these problems would go away, we should have been tougher . . . keeping and forcing these issues on to the agenda like we did on debt relief and other issues of international policy.”

Feud over? Not yet. Now Brown and Darling are said to be at odds over the size of the second stage of Britain’s stimulus package. Darling, perhaps like any good treasurer clutching the national purse strings, wants a smaller one than does Brown. Stay tuned.