THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY: We are surely approaching the final chapter of the Prime Minister's career, and the story is being written in Afghanistan and Libya
Prime ministers tend to be defined as much by their foreign policy as by what they achieve at home. Eden – Suez; Wilson – Vietnam; Heath – Europe; Thatcher – Falklands; Blair – Iraq. Hence the importance to Gordon Brown of getting Afghanistan right. Just like Barack Obama, he took over from a leader identified with Iraq, and found himself embroiled in another war, which had started before and which will go on afterwards. In both Britain and the US, a foreign war has become caught up in a domestic political drama.
President Obama faces his first crisis of popularity, forced to plead for his health-care reforms at a joint session of Congress this week, as Rupert Cornwell writes today. Brown is in such a pit of unpopularity that his problem is different. For him, Afghanistan is about much shorter-term politics. The two foreign affairs stories of the late summer, the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and the criticism of Brown's Afghanistan policy by Eric Joyce, the Labour MP and former army officer, feed into a Westminster narrative about the Prime Minister's survival as leader of his party.
The immediate focus was not on the content of Joyce's letter of resignation from the junior, unpaid post of parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Secretary. The first question was: is it part of another plot to try to destabilise the Prime Minister?
In this, Brown is partly the victim of the tactics that brought him into 10 Downing Street. Tony Blair was hustled offstage by the co-ordinated resignations of PPSs and the publication of a critical letter. That was a coup orchestrated by Brown's henchpersons. Brown can hardly complain when people assume that similar tactics are being deployed against him. He can hardly be surprised when it is pointed out that Joyce is a Blairite. So Blairite, in fact, that he voted against another inquiry into the Iraq war. He was only PPS to Ainsworth at all because he had held the same post under John Hutton, the once-implacable modernising ultra who resigned unexpectedly three months ago.
It was inevitable, despite Joyce's claim in his letter that "this seems to me the least disruptive time [to resign]", that it would be assumed he had timed his departure for maximum damaging effect, the day before Brown's big speech on Afghanistan.
The real story is rather different. Of course there will be another attempt from within Labour to dislodge Brown, just before or just after the party's annual conference in Brighton at the end of this month. But, like the resignations of Hazel Blears, Jacqui Smith, John Hutton and even James Purnell in June, it will be disorganised and more about people giving up than about a gritty determination to minimise a Conservative win. >>> John Rentoul | Sunday, September 06, 2009
