Can the Government Dig Itself Out?

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  Martin Bright

  Can the Government Dig Itself Out?

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

“Harriet Harman led the charge by broadly repeating what she had said in a banker-bashing speech in Yorkshire a few days earlier. She argued that bonuses should be clawed back. When bankers compete with paedophiles for bottom place in the league table of public esteem, there’s no doubt that Ms Harman vents the fury of many voters.

But her intervention did not impress all of her colleagues. “Knee-jerk, crudely populist stuff,” sniffs one member of the cabinet. There was a sharp response from John Hutton and Hazel Blears who warned that it would be perilous in the longer term for Labour to be seen as hostile to business. Ms Harman retorted that it was hardly anti-business to be anti-banker because no one currently hates bankers more than businesses struggling to get credit.

Ed Balls weighed in against her with a warning about swinging too far with the hang-a-banker mood. He advocated what Tony Blair would have called a Third Way: public fury about past excesses had to be satisfied, but it would be a disaster for Labour to become seen as an enemy of wealth creation.

Peter Mandelson observed to his colleagues that the furore over bonuses was symptomatic of a larger danger of looking as though they were being blown this way and that by the prevailing wind in the media. The government had to look anchored to give confidence that they knew what they were doing. Gordon Brown himself did not say much at all.”

Add to this the increasingly embattled approach taken by the court around Brown and the times look very dark for Labour. The strangest, but perhaps the most revealing story is Toby Helm’s account of the in-fighting at the super-union Unite. I’ve been picking up for some time from Labour MPs that there is deep unhappiness at the way Brown’s former special adviser Charlie Whelan has been throwing his weight around at the union. Toby has the scoop on the staff, including former Labour MP John Cryer, who has been off long-term sick and Unite’s political officer Sarah Merrill, who has been sidelined by Whelan.