All political parties have a left, right and centre. Labour was the same, but with a difference. It had two competing leaderships. One in Downing Street was official , the other in the Treasury was like a rebel government in waiting or a political insurrection. The latest revelations in the Telegraph, which appears to have access to yet more private papers, show just how much intellectual capital was spent plotting and resisting at the highest levels of government, in the Labour years. This was, anyway, a period of bad government practice, with the country being run by lolling on sofas and shouting in corridors. The strife between the the man who was and the man who wanted to be, leader is, for the nation, a pretty sorry tale. This is the worst way to run a country.
But it is over now. The question for Labour is whether it is over for the survivors. The Brownite team now hold all the key shadow offices. Harriet Harman, something of a unifying force and a competent caretaker, seems to have faded from the political radar. The two Eds, Douglas Alexander and Yvette Cooper now hold all the key shadow offices. Labour did rather well in the local elections ( except for a disaster in Scotland) and remains just sufficiently ahead in the polls to form a working majority in a snap election. Considering the scale of their defeat in 2010, this is not bad. Nevertheless the Coalition, which is a much better run government but shaky on policy, is showering the opposition with gaffes and u-turns, which should create big opportunities for an effective opposition. Yet somehow they don’t.
Why is that? Could it be that it was not so much Brown himself who was flawed, but his team? Taken together and now leading the opposition in all the key posts, they do look very much like the cast of a B movie. Nowhere is there to be seen a star. Neither are there to be seen any coherent ideas to replace the Coalition’s policies, which it is their function to oppose. Except to cut less and borrow more. To that nobody is listening.