After 13 years, voters do not need a second look at Labour

By Matthew d"Ancona Published: 9:00PM GMT twenty February 2010

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There is still a piece of me that finds it deeply treacherous when Peter Mandelson introduces his former lethal foe, Gordon Brown, with uncontrollable enthusiasm, as he did yesterday at Labour"s Coventry rally. To the strains of Jackie Wilson"s (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher, the Prime Minister gurned his approach to the podium, where he delivered a debate that unambiguously launched the choosing campaign, but essentially fixing polling day. Brown looked in his element, as well he might: he loves campaigning and he hates Tories.

Alas for the PM, in this debate he was arguing with himself as most as with David Cameron. "Elections are not verdicts on the past," he spoken yesterday, "they are choices for the future." Yet as a strategist in the 2001 and 2005 elections he argued to the discomfit of most Blairites precisely the opposite: in those contests, Gordon believed that Labour should simply carpet-bomb the Tories off the terrain with census data and justification of the past success. This time round, of course, he doesn"t have such weapons to hand, and wants, faute de mieux, to array one plans for the destiny (his own) opposite an additional (nasty, meant Mr Cameron"s).

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Well, one cannot error his audacity, I suppose. And he is right to interpretation as he apparently does that Labour is cursed if the choosing is simply a referendum on the Government. But I cannot see, after thirteen years of New Labour in office, how it could be anything else. The open sees a celebration that, in the dual and a half years given Brown became PM, has publicly and regularly agonised over his care and grown ever some-more introspective. Blair"s Big Tent has turn Brown"s Little Bivouac.

Fragmenting and shrinking prior to the unequivocally eyes, New Labour reeks of the past and the unequivocally obsolescence that Blair once neglected in John Major"s Tory party. One of the couple of Labour total indeed feared and reputable by the Cameroons is James Purnell, who had the bravery and probity to renounce from the Cabinet last June. His proclamation on Friday that he is to step down from Parliament is bad headlines for Labour in both a specific and a mystic sense. First, it removes from the PLP someone who similar to Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers and John Reid, additionally vacating indeed accepted how to sell centre-Left ideas to Middle Britain. Second, it says small for the destiny described by Brown yesterday that a statesman of Purnell"s percipience and guarantee has opted out of it.

Nor do I think that the PM is right to be so assured that Labour would win a conflict of the blueprints, were the choosing to be fought on that basis, rather than (as it will be) as a preference in between "change" or "more of the same" (see Thatcher"s feat in 1979, Clinton"s debate in 1992 and Blair"s in 1997 for details). Even as Brown alleges that the Tories would "cut front-line services", he reminds the electorate of the necessity that has grown to such abominable proportions on his watch, and the dearth of Labour"s own plans to plunge into the problem.

Cameron and George Osborne are mostly criticised for not being confidant or pithy sufficient in their plans for cuts. In fact, they have finished some-more than any Opposition on the verge of bureau to give specific examples of the suffering that lies forward (such as the £7 billion cuts voiced in Osborne"s discussion speech). Economists vie with each alternative to validate this or that party"s mercantile strategy. What unequivocally counts a domestic feat for that Cameron and Osborne get deficient credit is that they have done the necessity a core issue in this election. As prolonged as that stays the case, Gordon loses.

In his speech, he returned once some-more to his now-familiar thesis of the "mainstream majority" that is presumably abandoned by the absolved Tory elite. Certainly, Cameron has to safeguard that this assign does not stick: there are most lessons for the Tory personality to pull from the Joanne Cash episode, predominantly that he cannot concede the sense to toughen that the Conservative Party has been hijacked by an entryist squad of abundant west Londoners seeking out for one an additional at all costs. Meanwhile, when Sir Nicholas Winterton, the maestro Tory MP, says that standard-class passengers are "a all opposite sort of people", he does jagged repairs since he confirms the electorate"s residual suspicions about the Conservative Party"s loyal nature.

Fortunately for Mr Cameron and everybody else Sir Nicholas is station down from Parliament at this election. Even some-more opportunely for the Tory leader, Brown"s explain to paint the "mainstream majority" will regularly falter, since he is so closely and privately identified with thirteen years" value of measures that have squeezed the center class. Nor does the PM indeed receptive to advice as if he is in hold with Middle Britain. In his speech, he neglected the Tories essentially Chris Grayling, the shade home cabinet member for comparing sure tools of Manchester to Baltimore as decorated in The Wire. But some-more electorate in 2010 are fearful of drug-related crime, squad enlightenment and travel assault than are tender by Home Office statistics. They make use of the justification of their eyes and ears rather than Whitehall spreadsheets. In this respect, Mr Grayling speaks for the "mainstream majority", not Mr Brown.

In a Guardian talk yesterday, Douglas Alexander, Labour"s choosing co-ordinator, referred to the electorate"s "submerged optimism". Let us say, for the consequence of argument, that he is right: that underneath all the annoy and resentment, there is a well-concealed open self-assurance that things will get better. What is so conspicuous is that Mr Alexander thinks that Labour could feasible be the customer of this purported "optimism".

Electoral annoy underpinned by a idea that hold up competence usually urge with the right domestic care can have usually one judicious domestic outcome: a heightened enterprise to expostulate out the old, and move in the new. It was this aspect of British domestic enlightenment the genius of the first-past-the-post complement to get absolved of a Government decisively that New Labour exploited so well in 1997. Mr Alexander sneers at Mr Cameron"s "valueless promises of change", but he didn"t mind them when they were being done by his own party. Yesterday, Mr Brown invited the electorate to take a "second look" at Labour. The obstacle is that, after thirteen years, they have looked at the celebration all as well often, and have had enough. The sour law Gordon fails to learn is this: it"s the "second look" that is the problem.