Britain's unravelling

Local elections in Britain are fought on party lines and tend to reflect national political fortunes. With local and European elections taking place this month, anti-Brown plotters suspected—rightly, it turns out—that the results would be dismal for Labour. Several ministers resigned to weaken Brown in advance of the election results. Brown then faced the additional humiliation of trying to reshuffle his cabinet with MPs who didn’t want the job.

The resignations continued this week. Environment Minister Jane Kennedy quit on Monday and declared she could no longer support Brown’s leadership. A draft email asking Brown to step aside was circulated with the understanding that it would not be sent unless 50 MPs attached their names to it. Other rebels pushed for a secret ballot. Their goal, one way or the other, was to force Brown to step down. His replacement would likely have been the current home secretary, Alan Johnson, who publicly defends Brown while holding out the possibility that he may one day run to succeed him.

The Labour mutiny, however, has failed. While David Cameron describes the sparring as a “slow dance of political death,” Brown proved to be more resilient than the plotters had anticipated. First he hung on by his compulsively chewed, bloody fingernails. Then he fought back and was finally able to put together a cabinet that, for now, will stand behind him. His critics retreated. It turns out they’re not so brave after all. They’ll plot a coup but don’t have the guts to carry one out.

Gordon Brown’s refusal to roll over is more than stubborn pride. He believes—with some justification—that Labour MPs want to sacrifice him to appease voters who are furious at them because of the expenses scandal. The rebel MPs, on the other hand, calculated that Labour’s electoral prospects are so dire that Brown should fall on his sword for the good of the party. Few expect Labour to win the next general election anymore, but some MPs fear that the defeat under Brown could doom the party for a generation or worse.

“Nobody is using the ‘Canada word’ yet, but anyone who knows anything about the history of Canada will know that it’s not inconceivable for a major political party to be reduced to a small number of seats,” says Travers, the LSE professor. Canada’s once powerful Progressive Conservative party won only two seats in the 1993 federal election and ceased to exist a decade later. “That is the kind of threat they all feel hovers over them.”

A poll this week suggested that Labour would do better in the next general election if Alan Johnson were leader rather than Gordon Brown. On the other hand, there is some logic in allowing Brown to lead Labour into the next election, due by next June. He’ll absorb a beating before stepping aside for a new leader, untainted by defeat.

Either way, Brown, though still standing, has been wounded beyond recovery. His role in reviving the Labour Party and helping lead it to three electoral triumphs has been overshadowed by everything that’s happened since. “It’s an unfair world,” says James Hanning, deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday. “He’s waited 10 years for the job, and was in many ways the architect of New Labour. He didn’t get much credit for it when Blair was in power, and now he’s inherited it when everyone is fed up. The pendulum does swing. You can say that’s unfair, but I’m not sure what Gordon Brown or anybody else can do to prevent that.”

It’s a story that’s almost tragic, in the real, theatrical sense of the term. While Brown likened himself to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, British journalist Anne McElvoy sees parallels with another tormented character in British literature. “Now he resembles a political King Lear, a once towering figure on the blighted Labour landscape, the storms of the expenses crisis and economic turbulence howling around him,” she writes, and notes in his resolution a drift toward fatalism, as when Lear declared: “I am tied to the stake and must stand the course.”

Brown’s last stand does have a touch of noble defiance about it. But whether the storm buffeting Brown persists for days or months, it’s unlikely to end with another chance at redemption. Gordon Brown’s political career is ending. All that’s left for him to decide is how, and perhaps when, he faces his downfall.