A single scalp won't clear up this mess

Anne McElvoy
20 May 2009

Ritual slaughter concluded, an eerie air hangs over the Commons. Everyone, apart from a few loyalists of the shop steward tendency, knows Michael Martin was out of his depth and had to go.

Yet there is an uneasy feeling that he was forced out, while many of the worst offenders cling to office.

"We shot the monkey," one minister said to me grimly, "now what about the organ grinders?" The fear that Mr Martin was becoming a symbol of Labour's deeper hopelessness led Gordon Brown to withdraw his support abruptly and to tell Mr Martin so himself.

Every day the Speaker hung on was another bout of negative advertising for Brand Labour - whatever that is worth these days.

Mr Brown has found himself wrongfooted by a slick and nimble David Cameron, who finds new reserves of outrage every day to show he is not really on the side of the Moats-and-Oka-loving classes.

I do not mean this entirely as a compliment to dear Dave: there is sometimes a synthetic tinge when he works himself up.

He wanted to call for the Speaker's head - it's the nearest one to Mr Brown's you can get on a platter.

All constitutional whatnots notwithstanding, it would have better aided his own claim to transparency if he had simply said what he thought.

The PM's response was to lambast Hazel Blears, Labour's very own champion flipper of a bewildering number of residences, for "totally unacceptable behaviour".

She is thus left in the unpleasant situation of being a Cabinet minister disowned by her boss, without (yet) being sacked.

I assume the thinking here was to match Mr Cameron's coruscating tone. But Mr Brown still looked under-confident at his press conference, rather than vengefully stern.

If Ms Blears was so wrong, why keep her? Mr Brown seems to be hinting at the sack while not delivering it, which is hardly A-grade leadership.

True, the Communities Secretary was greedy and wholly in the wrong to exploit her expenses as she did.

But it will not help relations inside an already fractured inner team that he chose to highlight the affairs of one prominent Blairite as a lesson.

As for the "gentleman's club" analogy: it grates. Mr Brown has been a parliamentarian for 26 years and in his younger day, one very committed to the Commons. To simply trash the place now is not edifying.

The culture of Parliament which led to the toleration of Spanish practices was one accepted for too long by senior politicians.

Mr Brown would do better to admit being part of this and show that he, too, can learn a lesson.

Anyway, the heat is firmly back on the party leaders to show that they have a plan to steer their teams through a crisis which will not end quickly.

On the other side, Mr Cameron has to show he will be as tough with the "Oka tendency" of bright young things with a fondness for classy rattan furnishing as with the landed High Tories tending to their fencing and manure.

Expenses are now symbolic of a wider disillusionment and Mr Cameron has tried valiantly to amplify a fin de siècle mood around Mr Brown by calling daily for an election.

This can go on only so long. Either Mr Brown's position in the wake of the June vote will be so parlous that he will face a serious threat or voters will grudgingly conclude they have to bear with him, warts and all, till next year, in which case Mr Cameron will have to start talking about something else.

"In one way," says a Cabinet member highly critical of Mr Brown, "he's in his strongest position yet: a lot of those who might knife him are walking wounded themselves."

So Ms Blears, who was so cheekily teasing her boss for being useless on YouTube one minute, is now the officially shamed.

Jack Straw, who has long awaited the moment when he could don his grey suit and play undertaker/kingmaker, finds himself better known for his wonky "accountancy" with his council tax.

Even the young pretenders are knocked: David Miliband for his pram and potplant maladministration, James Purnell for seeking to cleanse the welfare system of scroungers while proving unequal to the task of keeping his own sink clean.

So a suspicious leader has, on paper, a perfect divide-and-rule situation but not on terms he can relish. One major deficit is that he so obviously hates interruptions to what he sees as the grand sweep of prime ministerial events.

Encounter him at the G20, or laying out his economic vision, and he cuts a sovereign, self-possessed figure.

Drag him in front of a press conference or into an interview about something he finds enervating, and he never really settles into a comfortable mode.

We know what Mr Cameron will sound like right now: he has struck up a tone of irritation to mimic the fury others feel. Mr Brown's tone is far less certain.

Having complained for so long that they were governed by a mere actor in Tony Blair, Labour is discovering the hard way what it is like to have someone who can't quite walk the walk when improvisation, rather than a set text, is required.

The next weeks will be a trial of brute strength between an Opposition leader who will make discreet capital out of a cross-party misfortune and a Prime Minister who sacrificed a Labour Speaker to save his own skin.

Mr Martin won't be much missed but his fate is a memento mori, all the same.

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