Splitting Heirs

It sometimes seems as if half of the British population is writing a column for a newspaper, and the other half is reading it. Nothing happens in that country until it has been tabloidized, columnized, turned into scuffle and counter-scuffle, gossip and counter-gossip. And the biggest tabloid show in recent years has been the dysfunctional marriage between the prime minister and his heir apparent, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. This being Great Britain, it is not enough that the newspapers and TV channels cover the event; the politicians themselves must carry on like journalists. Both camps, Blair and Brown, have their "own" reporters, to whom they feed recriminations and complaints, which are duly reproduced the next day in the appropriate newspaper- -death by a thousand leaks. If this fails, each camp can mobilize a loyal member of parliament to pen a quick column.Even by British standards, this squabbling has been tawdry and demeaning, and, in the last year or so, it has begun to look like an electoral liability. That is why, three weeks ago, eight junior members of Tony Blair's government resigned their ministerial posts and called upon the prime minister to announce the date of his departure--which would also be the date when Brown replaces him. Of course, the junior ministers are of Brown's camp, and journalistic opinion now seems to be that they acted at Brown's behest: He is tired of waiting for the crown to fall into his lap, and he has decided to seize it. Mark Antony has become Brutus. Blair at first refused to budge, and then he testily announced that he would leave office by the autumn of next year, though in a manner of his choosing. Almost simultaneously, a memo--presumably prepared by Blair's advisers-- mysteriously found its way onto the pages of a tabloid, The Daily Mirror. The nation guffawed: The memo, titled "Reconnecting with the public--a new relationship with the media" (of course!), lays out a plan for a kind of farewell magical mystery tour for Blair next year. He should appear on three shows (a children's TV show, a radio chat show hosted by a man with a silly accent, and a venerable BBC institution on Sunday evenings called "Song of Praise," in which jolly churchgoers sing hymns for what seems like a very long hour). The memo further recommended that the prime minister should visit 20 of the most striking buildings erected since 1997 (the year Blair first took office). It continued: "He needs to go with the crowds wanting more. He should be the star who won't even play that last encore. ... He needs to embrace open spaces, the arts and businesses, he needs to be seen traveling on different forms of transport. He needs to be seen with people who will raise eyebrows." No need for that last suggestion, now: Eyebrows will need to be lowered from their painfully raised rictus. How did it get so bad? We have to go back to 1994, when the Labour Party had been out of office for 15 years and was at last excitedly sniffing power. The party's widely respected leader, a sober Scottish lawyer named John Smith, had collapsed from a heart attack, and Brown and Blair, the coming men, were vying for the job. Back then, Brown--the quintessential party man--was considered the frontrunner. The Labour Party had a history of factionalism, ideological warring, and ill-discipline. Both Brown and Blair wanted to avoid a bitter fight, and, on May 31 of that year, at a trendy, now properly defunct restaurant called Granita in North London, Blair made a deal with Brown in which Brown agreed not to contest the leader's job on the understanding that, if the party were elected, Brown would be appointed to head the treasury, with broad power as chancellor of the Exchequer to run the economy as he saw fit. The "Granita deal" has iconic status in British life now, joining other sainted historical cruxes like King Alfred's burning of the cakes, the Black Hole of Calcutta, and Lord Nelson's dying words. It is unclear what, precisely, was promised. Brown's camp insists that Blair promised to fight only two elections, to stand down during a second term--assuming Labour stayed in power that long-- and to hand over the prime minister's job to his chancellor. Brown's camp is at pains to stress that Brown did not ask for this arrangement; it was freely offered. Blair duly became leader of the Labour Party, and he won a landslide victory in the general election of 1997, a slightly smaller victory in 2001, and a savagely reduced share of the vote in 2005. Brown became chancellor, a job he has held longer than any chancellor since 1832. He has had massive freedom to shape the British economy, and he runs the treasury as a fiefdom virtually independent of Blair's office. It has all worked out quite nicely--except that Blair never quit. The pianist Artur Schnabel once said that he didn't give encores because the audience's applause is the receipt, not the bill. Blair, it seems, doesn't understand this. He has become the star who won't stop giving encores. Everything changed with Iraq. People had satirized the Blair machine for its addiction to spin--and for the prime minister's tyrannical control over his once-divisive party. But his pious, earnestly frowning demeanor, with his hectic dentition and the vicar's voice so reminiscent of Sunday morning in the pew, was probably enjoyed as much as it was disliked; it did not yet seem unctuous. Yet the number of people who supported Britain's intervention in Iraq could have been squeezed onto one of the Hebridean islands, and, since 2003, it has been hard to find a good word for Blair, inside or outside his party. In the 2005 election, despite the fact that the Conservatives barely represented a viable opposition, Labour won only 35.2 percent of the national vote, to the Conservatives' 32.3 percent. The Ides of March beckoned for Blair; and Brown/ Brutus was getting itchy. The reason all this has come to a head, apart from Brown's impatience, is that the Conservative Party has an attractive, young new leader named David Cameron. It looks as if Brown and Cameron will face each other in a general election likely to be held in 2009, and it is by no means certain that the dour Brown, vastly more experienced than Cameron though he is, will win. Brown's supporters are very keen to let their man enjoy at least a couple of years in charge so that his deeds can count more than Cameron's words. Gordon Brown is a rather attractively old-fashioned figure. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and, raised in Adam Smith's town, Kirkcaldy, in Fife, he has Presbyterian virtues: He is sober, prudent (one of his favorite words), a little stolid. He is the anti-Blair. No seducer of the press, he speaks with measured gravity. Blair went to a fancy Scottish private school, and Brown to the local high school. He entered Edinburgh University at 16, studied history, and went on to write a doctorate there about the Labour Party in Scotland. Blair seems to have no great devotion to his party, and he has successfully renovated it by copying many of Margaret Thatcher's policies. Brown, by contrast, is a devoted Labour man. He has what seems a very Scottish, even Presbyterian, devotion to social justice and the redistribution of wealth. As chancellor, he has presided over a long period of economic growth, with low inflation and low unemployment, which has allowed him to stealthily tax the wealthy and give financial credits to the poor. He has massively increased funding to the health and educational systems; there have been real, if small, improvements in both. Cameron is a youthful 39, 15 years younger than Brown. The two men offer a study in contrast. If Brown fairly vibrates with Scottishness, Cameron (despite his Scottish name) is all Englishness. He was born in Oxfordshire, the son of a stockbroker. His wife is the daughter of a baronet. Cameron went to Eton, where he was my exact contemporary. Though I hardly knew him--we were from rather different social classes--in those days he seemed a natural Etonian, and he seems one still: gently entitled, socially charming and at ease, attractively confident. After Eton, he went to Oxford, and he has worked both as a political adviser and as a director of corporate affairs for a TV company. His political experience is slender: He has been a member of Parliament since 2001 and the leader of his party since December 2005. The country knows very little about the likely political decisions of either man. As chancellor, Brown has been a soft socialist with a cold Thatcherite heart, and he has kept the economy ticking along nicely. One could assume that a Brown government will retain the British pound and continue to give priority to the funding of public services (what the welfare state is now less threateningly called). But part of the sullen pain of his agon with Blair has meant that Brown has silently agreed to the prime minister's more flamboyant gestures while keeping his head down and running his own kingdom. His public support for the Iraq intervention has been lukewarm, and he is generally thought to lack Blair's messianic zeal in foreign affairs (except for a laudable involvement in reducing African debt); but no one really knows what a Brownian foreign policy would look like. Cameron, meanwhile, has been shrewdly modernizing the image of the Conservatives--by copying Tony Blair and heading shamelessly for the center (poetic justice, since Blair has often said how much he admired Thatcher). Conservatives who dislike Cameron--and there are plenty--like to say that, just as Blair destroyed the old Labour Party to make his so-called "New Labour," so Cameron, channeling Blair, is destroying the old Conservative Party. His supporters are more apt to claim that, just as Blair destroyed the old Labour Party, now Cameron, channeling Blair, will destroy New Labour in the election of 2009. Cameron has made the environment a big priority, and he likes to cycle to work. He has voted for civil partnerships, which give legal recognition to same-sex couples, and he has voted against Blair's obsessive desire to introduce national identity cards. On a recent trip to India, he sent back a daily blog, complete with video clips. His wife, creative director of the posh stationery company Smythson, has a dolphin tattooed on her ankle. Most importantly, he has gracefully diverted attention from the remarkable anachronism of his Etonian background. Orwell said that Englishmen are branded on their tongues, and Cameron's green-welly accent certainly gives him away. Yet, on television, he seems a merely well-educated modern fellow, almost (if not quite) classless--like the current prime minister. But what would a Cameron government look like? It looks as if, like Brown's, it would retain the pound and give priority to public services. And, like Brown, Cameron speaks an essentially Thatcherite managerial language about making these public services more efficient and consumerfriendly. In a recent foreign policy speech, Cameron laid out his stall as what he calls a "liberal conservative." He would be less pro-American than Blair. (But so would Brown.) At least in tone, Cameron sounds more obviously conservative than Brown. He proposes three principles: "First, a realistic appreciation of the scale of the threat the world faces from terrorism. Second, a conviction that preemptive military action is not only an appropriate, but a necessary component of tackling the terrorist threat in the short term. And, third, a belief that, in the medium and long term, the promotion of freedom and democracy--including through regime change--is the best guarantee of our security." This certainly sounds more bullish and more traditionally Conservative than the old Labour line on foreign policy--a party once committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament. But then Cameron goes on to talk about building "moral authority" and "humility," virtues he thinks Blair has lacked, and suddenly he sounds pretty much how one imagines Brown will sound. And Cameron knows perfectly well that talk about preemptive action is just talk: No British prime minister is going to support the Americans in preemptive action for a very long time. Blair has died, long live Blair! For whatever the prime minister does in the next year, it seems perfectly possible that Brown will lose to Cameron in 2009, and that the country will be led for several years, perhaps much longer, by Blair's natural heir, rather than the one unnaturally begot all those years ago at Granita.

By james wood