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.