 | The Blairites certainly grasp it. They see the Prime Minister as the best election-winning machine in the party's history and have long feared that the Chancellor's woeful communication skills will backfire on election day.' Fraser Nelson in Business, 12 th February 2006. |  |
THE Dunfermline intifada last week was anticipated by no one in Westminster. A sleepy town which had voted Labour for generations delivered a thunderbolt at 12.38am - it was such a surprise that, at first, the charred body of its victim was unidentified.
Was it Tony Blair? A few London newspapers concluded that the Prime Minister is visibly losing his Commons authority so the electorate of Dunfermline & West Fife sent him a 'go and go now' message by voting Liberal Democrat. Or was the victim David Cameron? After all this hype over a Tory revival, its vote almost halved - taking it from a weak fourth place to a helpless fourth place. A sign, it was whispered, that the Cameron phenomenon has not spread beyond Westminster.
Alistair Darling, who doubles as Scottish Secretary, gallantly identified himself as the main loser by accepting 'entire responsibility for the conduct of this election campaign' - and, ergo, its abject failure. But the real guilt lay in Russia.
Sitting at the G8 finance ministers meeting in Moscow, Gordon Brown said nothing about the Dunfermline campaign he had led to disaster. He had chosen the candidate, trod the turf, pressed the flesh and personalised events wherever possible. He declared there would be no quadrupling of the Forth Road Bridge vehicles' toll charge - a decision reserved for the infuriated devolved Scottish authorities. He chaired press conferences and decided campaign themes. He sensed victory and wanted it to be his.
Brown was born in Fife (the same town as Adam Smith): it is his homeland. Dunfermline & West Fife is a new seat, partly formed of his old Dunfermline East. He lives in the overlapping territory: his local MP is now a Liberal Democrat. He need not have showed his face - Labour had a majority of 11,500 voters: as safe as any MP could ask for. But Brown wanted to showcase his new image and prove what he can do when allowed to fly solo, without Blair.
Interviews were arranged in which John, his two-year-old son, made an entrance. One Guardian columnist gushed that the toddler inspired 'a complete transformation of his father's character'. This was the official line: New Brown, New Britain.
Catherine Stihler, the candidate, was made to regurgitate Brownite statistical babble. 'The £200 Winter Fuel allowance has warmed 13,000 pensioner homes,' ran her statements. '7,000 families are benefiting from the Child Tax Credit' and so on.
Press releases would begin 'Gordon Brown announces' - and detail schemes like 'plans to create 10,000 new jobs.' This turned out to vague aspirations to grow the economy. The electorate were being taken for idiots.
A local factory closure, loss of 700 jobs, rang more true - and resonated with the national trend of rising unemployment. For perhaps the first time since Labour came to power, the Brown fiction was demonstrably clashing with the British reality.
Add to this Scotland's propensity to swing away from Labour in by-elections and the result was one of its most humiliating defeats. This left Labour delegates with a sobering thought as they gathered in Blackpool for the spring conference.
If Brown can't win in his own back yard, if the king of Scots is rejected by even the Scots, what chance does he have of winning England? What if his mixture of control freakery and economic malaise triggers the same reaction in suburban England? It is unlikely Labour MPs will be daft enough to believe the official line that Alistair Darling was to blame. Enough of them were dispatched off to campaign in Dunfermline to know who was calling the shots, writing the lines.
The Blairites certainly grasp it. They see the Prime Minister as the best election-winning machine in the party's history and have long feared that the Chancellor's woeful communication skills will backfire on election day.
And the Dunfermline result fits a pattern. Last week, the Confederation of British Industry released a survey showing that its members shiver at the thought of a Brown-led government: four in five believe the reform agenda will stop as soon as he takes charge.
Alistair Darling grumbles that Dunfermline was fought on 'local issues' which is a polite way of saying that Brown's statistics left voters cold. The LibDems, by contrast, spoke fluent human - and campaigned locally.
Cameron, too, has had a dire week. He faced, for the first time, a full attack from Tony Blair who denounced him as a 'flip-flopper' because he switched so many policies. This is the exact phrase President Bush used to defeat John Kerry in November 2004.
But at least the Conservatives have seen how Brown can be beaten: the Chancellor cannot flip-flop and uses the same tired phrases again and again. Left to his own devices, he is capable of boring even his own core voters into open revolt.
Of the two tactics, the flip-flopper may do better with an electorate hungry for change. Labour last week witnessed the template for its own defeat. The Dunfermline intifada should haunt the party as it comes to choose its next leader.
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