Gordon Brown: This is the End...

Sometimes governments end not in a Shakespearean one fell swoop, but in a series of bangs and whimpers. Yesterday a loud bang went off under the government of Gordon Brown. The British prime minister not only lost a vote on the House of Commons where his Labour Party has a majority; he lost a vote on a seemingly peripheral issue – a Liberal Democrat proposal to give all Nepalese Ghurkha soldiers who have served in the Armed Forces an equal right of residence in the United Kingdom. Peter Riddell’s assessment in today’s Times of London perfectly reflects the state of political-establishment opinion in and around Whitehall: “Brown’s premiership faces a lingering death as painful as that experienced by John Major in 1996-97 unless he gets a grip quickly.” 

Meanwhile, Brown today faces another seback in the Commons over the corrosive issue of MPs’ expenses. This summer, parliamentary housekeepers will reveal to the public some 1.3 million receipts for MPs' spending on second homes, travel and office costs over the last several years – a Freedom of Information disclosure that will further embarrass Labour as the majority party and add to the end-of-regime feeling that pervades the Brown government. Brown sought to defuse the expenses issue by going on YouTube last week and putting forth a new bookkeeping regime on his own design. That move backfired in terms of both presentation (he came across badly; see "Omigod" below) and substance (his clumsy idea of paying MPs on a per diem basis for showing up to work was so poorly conceived and received that he backed off it himself after a few days). 

The conventional wisdom is that Brown won't get a grip and his Labour Party are doomed to go down in defeat at the next election, which he must call before June 3, 2010. Even among the most loyal Labour MPs there’s a growing recognition that Brown lacks the political skills and personality to turn things around at this point. His one slender reed of hope – that somehow he would be seen to master the deepening economic crisis – has slipped further and further away him. He and his team hoped to improve Brown’s political fortunes on the back of the G20 Summit in London in early April, but whatever small boost he gained from that meeting quickly faded as it became clear that the get-together was a pretty inconsequential event in the face of the Great Recession.

Labour MPs are despairing. There's a lot of talk around Westminster about forcing Brown out and replacing him with ... Well, that's the problem. Some of the chatter centers around Alan Johnson, a seasoned and appealing MP who's served in government under Brown and, before him, under Tony Blair. Johnson, 58, is seen by some MPs as an interim figure who could conceivably lead the party into the next general election. The thinking is that Labour would lose the election and Johnson would step aside for ... Again, that's the problem. A sense of drift has taken over the party that so handily and convincingly won the 1997 election, ending 18 years of Tory rule. The drift seems likely to continue. Labour MPs I speak to are resigned to another year of muddling along. They don't like it, but they don't know how to stop the drift.    

Omigod

"Banter between Blokes"

 It’s a tough-guy quote that has been attributed to any number of alpha males, from Admiral of the Fleet John Arbuthnot Fisher of the Royal Navy to Benjamin Disraeli to John Wayne: “Never apologize, never explain.” Then again, sometimes you have to do both, especially if you’re in deep, deep trouble. Which is exactly where British Prime Minister Gordon Brown found himself over the long Easter weekend after one of his closest and longest-serving aides was caught planning a smear campaign against the PM’s political enemies. 

            “Smeargate,” as it is inevitably called, centers on Damian McBride, director of strategy and planning at 10 Downing Street. In an email exchange that leaked to the press, McBride – known as “McPoison” for his clinical dispatching of Brown antagonists over the years – proposed spreading scurrilous and unsubstantiated stories about Conservative Party leader David Cameron, his shadow chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and a couple of lesser Tories. After the story broke last week, the 34-year-old McBride apologized for the “juvenile and inappropriate” slurs and resigned a day later, on Saturday. By Monday Brown had written personal letters of apology to McBride’s targets and was calling for new rules to govern the conduct of special advisers in government. 

            The episode says a lot about the bunker mentality of some of those in Brown’s inner circle, if not Brown himself. Polls show the Tories consistently racking up a double-digit lead over Labour in the polls ahead of a general election Brown must call sometime before June 3, 2010. Brown managed only a slight bump in his ratings after hosting the agreeable if not hugely successful G20 Summit two weeks ago. As Smeargate demonstrates, at least some members of the Brown squad are desperate to make up some lost ground. That even a single renegade aide – if that’s what McBride was – would resort to smear tactics is a reminder, in the view of some of Brown's critics, that his political apparatus is accustomed less to governance than to engaging in the strong-arm tactics it used to deploy against Prime Minister Tony Blair, the rival Brown spent so many years trying to outflank. 

When the story broke, and before the content of the emails was known to the public, McBride and his allies tried to dismiss the affair as “banter between blokes.” The other “blokes” involved were Derek Draper, who runs the party-sponsored website Labour List, and Charlie Whelan, a labor union executive who was Gordon Brown’s spokesman during the early Blair years when Brown was chancellor of the Exchequer  In his email, McBride characterized his smears as “a few ideas I have been working on for Red Rag,” a Labour-leaning website designed to counter several well-established Tory-leaning blogs. 

If the ideas were mere “banter,” Draper seemed to treat them more seriously than that: according to the London Sunday Times, he replied just 20 minutes after McBride sent his email. “Absolutely totally brilliant Damian,” he wrote. “I’ll think about timing and sort out the technology this week so we can go as soon as possible.” In his original email, McBride admitted his tall tales “are gossipy and mainly intended to destabilize the Tories.” In the end, of course, they mainly destabilized the man at whose right hand he had worked since the early 2000s – Gordon Brown.

 

The Colossus of the North

As a very infrequent visitor to the United Arab Emirates, I'm struck by the federation's deep concern about Iran. As an American living in London, my own preoccupation with Iran focuses on four points: 1) will it militarize its nuclear energy program? 2) if so,  when? 3) what are the United States, Britain, France and Germany going to do about it, and 4) what is Israel going to do about it.

These are serious concerns, obviously, but they feel almost antiseptic and academic compared to the gut fear experienced by the people and the powers-that-be in Abu Dhabi, the UAE federal capital, and Dubai, its largest city and financial capital, where I spent last week. There, the threat of Iran is up close and personal. Iran has long been a regional power, but for years it was kept in check by its neighbor Iraq. Once upon a time, the United States recognized this; hence, Washington's erstwhile backing of Saddam Hussein against Iran after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Washington's previous regional best friend, by the Islamic Revolution under by Ayatollah Khomeini. The U.S.-led war in Iraq has now completely undone the old balance of power in the region and left the UAE feeling particularly vulnerable to Iranian power plays. What the rest of the world might consider to be medium-size provocations or disruptions, like preventing oil-tanker traffic and other trade through the Strait of Hormuz, would be devastating for the UAE.

The UAE has sought to counter the Iranian threat by cementing its ties to the world beyond the greater Middle East. Those ties are clear. Dubai is a highly air-conditioned Western-Asian financial capital that happens to be perfectly situated at a longtime trading crossroads. Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven emirates, is one of the world's largest oil producers and as such enjoys the protection of the United States and Europe. Less well known is the extent to which the UAE has sought to be seen as an ally to U.S. geopolitical causes. The UAE (population ca. 5 million) has a small number of troops -- less than 200 -- in Afghanistan, for example.

Most recently, the UAE has sought to counter the Iranian nuclear threat with a very different nuclear threat of its own. Abu Dhabi is forming "transparent" partnerships with nuclear nations like the United States and France in order to develop peaceful nuclear energy, which it will need (to desalinate sea water and produce electricity, for example) as oil and natural gas reserves are depleted. In contrast to Iran (so far, at least), the UAE is happy to let an international body enrich the uranium it would need for nuclear power in order to demonstrate its unwillingness to become a nuclear-weapons power. The UAE approach, which is being done in coordination with other states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, sends out two quite canny messages. One, that Iran, too, could go down this road. And two, as Abdulaziz Sager's Dubai-based Gulf Research Center has pointed out, that the UAE and other GCC members are leaving their options open to develop a military nuclear program down the road.