Afternoon:
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After all the talk of a Cabinet coup to unseat Gordon Brown, the Labour conference seems certain to conclude today with the Prime Minister firmly in the saddle.
But this is surely no surprise, for prime ministers are notoriously hard to depose — and history is littered with the skeletons of failed plotters.
The classic botched plot was the “Relugas Compact” of 1905, when the rising stars of the Edwardian Liberal Party, Sir Edward Grey, HH Asquith and Richard Haldane, met secretly at Grey's fishing lodge in the Scottish village of Relugas. They agreed that when their party leader, the affable and enormously fat Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (“C-B”), reached No 10, they would kick him upstairs to the House of Lords, allowing them to run the government from the Commons. But like so many plots, the Relugas deal collapsed almost immediately.
When C-B took no notice of the conspirators' ultimatum, they feebly lost their nerve. Both Asquith and Haldane meekly accepted Cabinet posts, and while Grey had the guts to confront his leader, he too backed down eventually. “Do you know, it was the comicality of it that I could hardly get over,” C-B said later. “They all came in — no conditions; no nothing; and there they are.”
Later prime ministers followed C-B's stalwart example. In the Forties, Labour leader Clement Attlee was widely felt to be a feeble nonentity, and just before the 1945 election the party chairman Harold Laski wrote, asking him to step down.
But Attlee had no intention of doing so. “Thank you for your letter, contents of which have been noted,” read his terse reply. And two years later, when his Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, insisted he step aside for another man, Attlee still refused to budge. “Lord Limpet”, the press called him; not until 1955 did he quit of his own accord.
By far the most plotted-against Prime Minister, though, was another Labour leader, Harold Wilson. In July 1966, with the economy apparently in meltdown, his ministers conspired behind his back while he was away in Moscow but could not agree on a successor.
Two years later a group of young Labour MPs formed “dissident cells” to replace him with the Chancellor Roy Jenkins but the challenger lost his nerve at the last minute. Meanwhile, the newspaper baron Cecil King even tried to organise a coup led by Lord Mountbatten, and yet again Wilson refused to move. “I know what's going on,” he defiantly told supporters. “I'm going on!”
The truth is that if the Prime Minister stands firm, most plots usually fizzle out. Even John Major held on to the premiership for six years despite constant plotting by the notorious Cabinet “bastards”.
When a man has his hands on the top job, it is awfully hard to get rid of him — as Gordon Brown knows only too well.
