THE TELEGRAPH: As the day of reckoning looms, Labour has lost any concept of the national interest, says Simon Heffer.
We know that the British public holds the political class in more contempt than ever, and it did not take the expenses scandal to reach that pass. Turnout has slumped over the past three general elections. The rise of the BNP, Ukip and the Greens displays the search for alternatives to three main parties that are seen as institutionalised in their careerist, self-serving approach to politics. With another election due within nine months, our democracy looks unattractive.
Even so, the Prime Minister contrives day after day to make things worse: and his cronies and fellow ministers contrive to follow and support him in this decline of reputation and standards. Not since 1992, and the debacle of Black Wednesday, can one remember a time when the credibility of a government collapsed so rapidly and so utterly during a long summer recess as over the past three weeks. Had the Westminster village been full, one wonders whether Mr Brown would at last have met his downfall.
The mess of the release of the Libyan bomber, the cesspit of who said what to whom, when and in what context, has exposed a government without scruple, principle or much intelligence, and has confirmed that it is in a state of near-complete incoherence. There is no surer mark of a government in meltdown than that it loses the ability to lie properly. Last week David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, went on the wireless to say that the Government had not wanted the Libyan bomber to die in jail. On Monday Ed Balls, the increasingly unlovely Schools Secretary, told John Humphrys on the Today programme that no one in the Government wanted the bomber's release. In that contest, incidentally, one instinctively knows whom to believe.
It is an obvious point, but one had better make it none the less: this is about leadership. Often, in his career as Chancellor, Mr Brown did his Macavity act. It was easy, if unedifying, for him. The economy was (so he claimed) going well. The embarrassments for the Government were elsewhere – party funding, the NHS, constitutional reform, and above all our involvement in foreign wars. So although one tended to expect the second most important man in the administration to have a view on these questions, and to be there in support of the Prime Minister when the knives were unsheathed, one was inevitably disappointed. Soon, one came no longer to expect it. Moral cowardice and not the moral compass became the defining feature of Mr Brown.
None the less, his party elected him nemine contradicente as leader, and he became Prime Minister; and, without any surprise at all, he proceeded to demonstrate a disappointing consistency. There has been one subtle shift: whereas in the past the silence was interminable, now (perhaps in recognition of the higher duties of a prime minister) it is broken two or three weeks into a crisis, with a stumbling assertion of sentiments that may or may not be honestly held. We have seen this in the Libyan episode. Such a procedure makes the Prime Minister look weak, ineffectual, in a corner. In the interim the media will have savaged him. His colleagues, pressed by the likes of Mr Humphrys in broadcast interviews, will to some extent have gone freelance. Their advisers, briefing the press, will also have gone freelance, quite probably in a different direction. >>> Simon Heffer | Tuesday, September 08, 2009
