New Problems and Old Friction Put British Premier in Political Jeopardy
Britain's prime minister, Gordon Brown, is facing mounting pressure within his Labour Party after the party took a drubbing in recent polls.
LONDON — Gordon Brown is still six weeks away from his first anniversary as Britain’s prime minister, a job he hankered after so keenly during much of his 10 years as Tony Blair’s No. 2 that the two men ended up barely able to speak to each other or agree on major policy issues.
Now, embattled at 10 Downing Street by the most dismal poll ratings for any prime minister in recent memory and sniping from Blair loyalists in the governing Labor Party, Mr. Brown is fighting for his political life.
Two weeks ago, in an election widely seen as a referendum on Mr. Brown’s national leadership, a joke-cracking Conservative with a flop-top haircut, Boris Johnson, romped to victory in London’s mayoral race over the hitherto popular two-term Labor incumbent, Ken Livingstone.
Mr. Brown faces another test in a May 22 parliamentary by-election, in a formerly safe Labor seat in the Midlands. The contest, centering on the industrial town of Crewe, appears to give the Conservatives a strong chance of their first by-election gain from Labor in 30 years. Political pundits predict that if the seat is lost, Mr. Brown could face a challenge for the Labor leadership.
A general election is due by the spring of 2010, and a flurry of recent opinion polls have shown a Conservative lead of 20 percentage points, spurring nervousness among Labor members of Parliament who fear losing their seats.
Analysts have compared Mr. Brown to the hapless John Major, the last Conservative prime minister, who was ousted in the Labor landslide of 1997.
Many of Mr. Brown’s political woes can be traced to economic problems associated with the credit crunch on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain has faced accelerating inflation, a weakening pound, upheaval in the banking sector and falling home prices. And he has not escaped a personal accounting for much of what has gone wrong, in part because he was chancellor of the Exchequer during the years of fast-rising public and personal debt that preceded the current economic turbulence.
After a hopeful beginning last summer, when Mr. Brown was widely praised for his handling of Britain’s worst floods in a generation, failed terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, an outbreak of potentially disastrous foot-and-mouth disease among cattle and an accelerated drawdown of British forces in Iraq, his fortunes have plunged amid a welter of policy miscues and economic setbacks.
The most damaging of these has been Mr. Brown’s decision as chancellor, in his final budget last year, to abolish a 10 percent income tax rate for certain workers — a change that critics, many of them within the Labor Party itself, say will hurt more than five million of Britain’s poorest people. On Tuesday, public anger over the tax issue led the Brown government to announce what amounted to a $5.3 billion tax cut for anyone earning less than $80,000 a year.
The latest salvos began exploding around Mr. Brown last weekend with the newspaper serialization of the memoirs of Cherie Blair, the wife of the former prime minister. In her book, “Speaking for Myself,” due for publication in the fall, she wrote that Mr. Brown had been “rattling the keys” to Downing Street over Mr. Blair’s head in the period before his third election victory, in 2005.
Mrs. Blair’s accounts of the feuding by the two were compounded when memoir excerpts from another veteran of the Blair years, John Prescott, were also published over the weekend. Mr. Prescott, who was deputy prime minister, said he had sought unsuccessfully for years to broker peace between the men, participating in “what must have been hundreds of phone calls, meetings, pre-summits, summits and dinners” with them.
In an excerpt from her book published on Monday, Mrs. Blair hinted that Mr. Brown might have leaked word to newspapers when she was pregnant with her fourth child, Leo, in 1998, suggesting that perhaps Mr. Brown, then still a bachelor in his mid-40s, wanted to spread the impression that Mr. Blair was too distracted by family matters to be effective as prime minister. A spokesman said Mr. Brown, now married with two small children, was “totally baffled” by the suggestion.
Perhaps more damaging was Mr. Prescott’s assertion that Mr. Brown was subject to repeated fits of anger, something Downing Street insiders have also suggested since he became prime minister. Mr. Prescott described Mr. Brown as “frustrating, annoying, bewildering and prickly,” and said that at times he could “go off like a bloody volcano.”
Together, the memoirs offered an unflattering portrait that seemed likely to reinforce the widespread sense that Mr. Brown was no match for the easygoing charisma of Mr. Blair — and perhaps for the 41-year-old Conservative leader, David Cameron. Many who have met Mr. Brown, including senior American officials, say he is more charming in person than the dour, somewhat grumpy figure he often seems on television.
For the Labor Party, the spectacle of some of the party’s most prominent figures feuding bitterly in public has been almost as damaging as the grim characterizations of Mr. Brown, drawing more comparisons to the last years of Mr. Major, when he presided over a government whose public support evaporated amid Conservative infighting, scandals and economic blunders.
Publishing industry insiders have said Mrs. Blair sped up the serialization of her memoir to take advantage of the turmoil embroiling Mr. Brown. British newspapers have said Mrs. Blair received an advance of $3 million for the book, plus hundreds of thousands of dollars for the serialization rights.
The dissension has exposed continuing fissures between the reformist “New Labor” wing associated with Mr. Blair, and a left-wing contingent that accepted Mr. Blair because of his ability to win elections but saw Mr. Brown, a Scot with strong leftist links, as a reluctant New Laborite who would return the party to a more socialist stance. Some of the harshest criticism of Mr. Brown has come from former Blair loyalists still bristling over the way Mr. Brown pushed their man to resign halfway through the term he won in 2005. They have pointed to one recent poll suggesting that 55 percent of people who voted Labor in 2005 favor Mr. Brown’s quitting the Labor leadership now.
Mr. Brown, stoic in the face of the attacks, has drawn some analogies of his own from the Conservative years in power, noting that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Mr. Major overcame poor opinion poll showings between elections to win new mandates in general elections. In the House of Commons, Mr. Brown has dismissed Mr. Cameron and the Conservatives as substituting political showmanship for substance, and predicted that British voters will turn back to Labor as his government introduces new social and economic policies.
He has also vowed not to quit.
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