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The week that brought Gordon Brown to the brink. Can he survive?

This article is more than 15 years old
Gordon Brown shared a joke with Barack Obama yesterday morning but he struggled to find anything cheerful about the rest of his week. The disastrous result in the Glasgow East byelection has sparked anxiety within government at the prospect of a meltdown at the next election. The coming month will be crucial as the Prime Minister seeks to regain his grip on the country - and his party

Only a few hundred yards, and a few minutes, separated the two encounters. But as Barack Obama's entourage moved from his grand reception at Downing Street to a chat with David Cameron in the sun-soaked cloisters of Westminster yesterday, he entered a different world.

Gordon Brown pulled out all the stops to show he could do funky-and-relaxed as well as any tieless Tory. The meeting was shifted from his formal study to the pretty garden terrace, the laughter of the two men drifting back through the open windows. Obama was even whisked upstairs to the family flat to meet not just Sarah Brown and their two small boys but Sarah's brother and family, due to holiday with them in Suffolk.

But despite his spin doctors' heroic efforts, the elephant in the corner of the Thatcher Room - where the men posed for photos beside a chunk of rock from the first moon landing, a gift from President Nixon - was the growing fear that Brown may be gone from office before Obama ever reaches the White House.

No wonder Obama was welcomed to his next engagement by a broadly grinning Cameron. The worst thing that happened to the Tory leader last week was having his bike nicked. The Prime Minister, by contrast, is having his party stolen from under him.

A disastrous drubbing in Glasgow East means his time is now measured by his own ministers in weeks, not months. 'It's curtains, I think,' says one senior minister, who predicts a move against him as early as the end of August.

In private Brown is said to rage against those he believes have betrayed him: he is even said to feel his closest confidant, the Children's Secretary Ed Balls, has 'let him down'. A recent visitor to Downing Street describes him as 'completely alone' and strangely at a loss.

On the face of it, the loss of Glasgow East to the SNP on a 22 per cent swing is neither unprecedented nor necessarily lethal: Peter Kellner of the pollsters YouGov says the scale of it is 'not common, but not that unusual'. Tony Blair lost Brent East on a 29 per cent swing and won the next election, while Neil Kinnock led Labour for another four years after losing Glasgow Govan in 1988 on a 33 per cent swing to the SNP.

But what makes this defeat so toxic is that it is seen as the final piece in the jigsaw. Since May, Brown's government has been overwhelmingly rejected at the ballot box in four very different places: suburban London, leafy Henley, the mixed and the historically Labour area of Crewe and now the deprived wastelands of Glasgow East.

Which means the rot has spread beyond any specific group. Kellner's analysis shows Labour in decline right across the electorate - young and old, rich and poor, men and women, every corner of the New Labour coalition. Minor tweaks for specific interest groups - scrapping this or that tax - will not solve the problem. The whole project, up to and including the leader, needs a rethink. 'Glasgow is confirmation that the virus has reached every part of our body politics,' says a well-connected and angry ex-cabinet minister who has been canvassing former colleagues. 'If we go on like this for two years we will be massacred.'

Another senior party figure says backbenchers fall into two camps: 'One is, "it's dire but there's not much we can do about it", and the other is, "it's dire and we have only got a few months to turn it around".

'Glasgow has probably increased the number of people in the second camp. Gordon could turn it around, but he would have to work his socks off.'

And if he can't? 'Then I think the pressure for him to go will be enormous. If there hasn't been movement by early autumn then I think people's minds will concentrate.'

The historical parallel MPs now mention most is the Mid-Staffordshire byelection of 1990. The Tories lost to Labour on a 21 per cent swing fuelled by anger at the poll tax, and Margaret Thatcher was forced out by her colleagues within months. Does the same fate await Brown?

Up until last Tuesday, it all seemed so different. Ministers phone-canvassing for the byelection found nothing but Labour voters, Tory troubles were taking the heat off Brown: even petrol prices were finally coming down.

The polls gave Labour a lead in Glasgow and Brown was enjoying the rare feeling of something going right. As late as Wednesday night, Scottish party officials briefed they would hold the seat with a 1,000 majority.

So what went wrong? It has very little to do with latent Scottish nationalism - the SNP campaigned on rising fuel and food bills, not home rule - or with the candidate, Margaret Curran.

Admittedly, the seat had been neglected for years due to the sitting MP David Marshall's illness; when the Downing Street team moved in, its records held barely a dozen 'voter IDs' - voters identified by canvassing as definitely Labour.

But it had a majority of more than 13,000, and while affection for Brown might be waning, he could count in Glasgow on a fierce resentment of perceived English snobbery toward a Scottish Prime Minister.

'For everyone who said, "I don't like that Gordon Brown," you got one, "it's terrible what they're doing to him down there",' says a senior campaign source.

But two days ago, alarm bells began to sound. 'The story of this campaign was "I've voted Labour all my life but I'm not voting for you this time - I cannot make ends meet,"' says one senior strategist. By Wednesday afternoon, rumours of disaster were spreading.

Nonetheless, when confirmation came in the early hours of Friday, the reaction was shell shock.

'It's different to all the others,' one normally loyalist cabinet minister says gloomily. 'And I don't think we fully understand what happened yet.'

Brown's leaden response at Friday's gathering of unions and activists at Labour's national policy forum in Warwickshire, repeating his now familiar mantra that he would keep on keeping on, hardly lifted spirits.

After hours cooped up in sweaty overheated rooms arguing about the manifesto, tempers began boiling over, with bad-tempered clashes between unions and ministers and much furtive texting.

The forum has exposed a deeper weakness however. Brown's cupboards are painfully bare: where are the big new ideas to dig Labour out of its hole? Apart from more evening access to GPs, where does the NHS go next? Can academy schools be rolled out fast enough to turn around sink comprehensives? What will Labour give families to match Tory tax breaks?

The only hint at answers came with Brown's references to 'fairness', the key word around which Downing Street's slender hopes of an autumn comeback are built.

There is talk of spending billions funded from borrowing on another rescue package for homeowners and families hit by the credit crunch. The child poverty strategy will be rebranded 'fairness for families', to dispel the complaint on doorsteps that the government only helps the destitute and is not for 'people like us', with children's tax credits and benefits in line for generous rises.

But what ministers fear is that voters are beyond bribing. After all, Brown has actually done what most of what his critics want - bailing out mortgage lenders, arranging for councils to buy up unsold flats and freezing fuel duty for motorists - but nothing gets through.

'It doesn't seem to me as if policy is making a difference, and that's the worry,' says one cabinet minister, who argues voters now seem oblivious even when Labour delivers what they want, from lower crime figures to a better NHS. A former colleague is more blunt: 'Our difficulty with Gordon is not that he's bad: it's are people listening to a word he's saying?' The fear is that they are listening to the Tories instead.

On a traffic-choked south London road near the Oval cricket ground sits the offices of Tomorrow's People, a small charity specialising in finding jobs for the apparently unemployable, from former gang members to ex-addicts.

Tomorrow Chris Grayling, the Tory welfare spokesman, will launch plans here to tackle worklessness and bridge the yawning divide in British cities between the rich and the poor, brought home recently when a teenage boy was stabbed to death on the London doorstep of Tory MP Ed Garnier.

There are few votes for the Tories still in the inner cities, but they are counting on millions of better-off urban Britons who want something done about families who have not worked for three generations, about the crime and anti-social behaviour that follows, about the sheer waste of human potential and public money.

Grayling's 'tough love' strategy reflects a new moral agenda Cameron is developing, an almost puritan movement built around the themes of personal responsibility, family values, and financial abstemiousness, from the rejection of reckless tax cuts, to the reform of Commons expenses.

Hugging hoodies has given way to the smack of traditional Conservative thinking, such as suggesting that the poor and fat should take responsibility for their plight, softened with a dollop of Blairite talk about helping the excluded.

As the former Labour spin doctor Colin Byrne wailed recently on his blog: 'This is not a Daily Mail agenda. This is our agenda.' And Labour is losing it. Hence the decision to let James Purnell, the Welfare and Pensions Secretary, publish a paper four days before the byelection threatening a revamp of the very benefits on which many Glasgow voters survive.

Brown's team admits it was risky but do not believe it backfired, arguing the working poor in places like Glasgow are the fiercest advocates of welfare reform.

Purnell's stock is certainly rising. Politically bold, personally plausible, and undoubtedly ambitious, he has told friends that he would not stand for the leadership in any contest and would back David Miliband but he may well come under pressure to change his mind this autumn.

Last month's itinerary for the Foreign Secretary was interesting, to say the least: Palestine, Tokyo, Luxembourg, Brussels - and Slough.

The commuter town hosts the only council Labour now controls outright in the whole of the south, a mecca for those wanting to know how Labour can recapture Middle England.

And nobody thinks a busy minister visited for the free fruit smoothie named in his honour that the leader of a local playgroup gave him.

Miliband is unmistakably spreading his wings. He got top billing at UNISON's recent political conference, and a soft focus interview with GQ magazine earlier this year discussing the previously banned topic of his two adopted sons raised eyebrows.

But power is no longer necessarily his for the taking. 'He has not trained on, to use the horse racing expression,' says a former admirer who argues Miliband may be losing ground to Purnell.

Which is one reason Brown is in no immediate danger. Miliband will not strike first.

Jack Straw, the most likely figure with the authority to tell Brown his time is up and also a likely caretaker leader, went on holiday on Friday morning leaving instructions for Labour MPs to think 'calmly and rationally' rather than revolt.

The third likely candidate, Ed Balls, will not move against his mentor. And Alan Johnson still lacks the appetite for a job he believes will wreck his family life. So mobiles will hum this August, but it will be early September before final calculations are made about the state of the government, the economy, and the likelihood of Brown changing either.

Backbenchers would prefer the cabinet to engineer a bloodless departure, probably via a private delegation urging Brown to announce his resignation at this year's party conference, and if they don't senior MPs say trouble will follow: 'They would not just sit back and let nothing happen.'

Straw and the chief whip Geoff Hoon are seen as key players but ministers are also looking to Ruth Kelly, whose Bolton seat is highly marginal, and to the arch Blairite John Hutton. It is even possible that Alistair Darling, a long-time ally, could be persuaded to approach Brown as a friend if he believed someone more hostile might get there first.

The trouble with the fabled 'men in grey suits' - authority figures who can convincingly tell a damaged leader privately that his time is up - is that their power is largely a myth.

The Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith was visited by such a delegation at least twice, according to one shadow cabinet minister - 'He just told them to fuck off.' Tony Blair similarly dismissed private appeals from former Labour leader Neil Kinnock to go.

What is holding cabinet assassins back, according to one ex-minister, is the fear that Brown will refuse to go and the rebels will not back them up when it comes to it. 'It's like when you tell a wife who separates from her husband, "I always thought he was a bastard". And then she takes him back and never speaks to you again.'

Kellner, who is married to the cabinet minister Baroness Ashton, argues that comparisons with Thatcher's defenestration by her own cabinet are historically misleading. 'Then you had an assassin, an alternative strategy and unambiguous evidence that she was the problem. None of those three conditions seems to apply now.'

Polls in the early 1990s, he argues, showed repeatedly that the Tories would do much better without Thatcher, while polling now suggests no such great leap of support for Labour if led by Miliband or Straw. The other major hurdle to a coup is that a new leader would almost certainly have to call an election within six months to gain legitimacy, meaning an election next spring, held amid falling house prices and rising unemployment. It would probably not only cost Labour money it does not have, but swathes of seats.

Even the most ardent Blairites no longer argue that jettisoning the leader would be enough to win an election, only that as one puts it 'it might help reduce a massacre', saving enough MPs so Labour could rebuild quickly in opposition.

Which means many backbenchers itching to ditch Brown know that in doing so, they may well render themselves unemployed.

What changed last week is that more of them are now ready to close their eyes and jump.

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