James Forsyth
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It is the draining away of Labour support that has enabled the BNP to win two seats in the European parliament, Cruddas admits. ‘The BNP has traction because this is a movement for Labour supporters and the BNP is now developing a culture of class politics which we have left behind,’ he said. He is scathing about those who dismiss the BNP success as just a protest vote. ‘If we are actually just caricaturing this as protest votes, caricaturing this as protectionism, xenophobic, etc, etc, you are not showing respect for the people themselves who are voting this way. It is not just about race, it is not just about protest, it is actually much more enduring… we are not even getting to first base on this stuff.’
The conversation moves to ‘British jobs for British workers’, the slogan that Brown infamously borrowed from the BNP, and the Lindsey refinery dispute. Cruddas, a mild-mannered man, is furious about the haughty arrogance meted out to the strikers. ‘It was disrespectful to people who are traditionally the cornerstone of the Labour project. Now if that is the response that is greeted to your cries for help, then you will go elsewhere.’ It was, of course, the new First Secretary of State who was most disdainful of the strikers, suggesting that the British workers weren’t that good and that the protests were motivated by xenophobia.
Despite his irritation with Mandelson over the Lindsey affair, Cruddas was almost as important as the Business Secretary in winning Brown a stay of execution last week. His standing on the left of the party makes him a potential king-maker, if not more. If he had been prepared to mobilise the left behind the rebellion, it could have been enough to make Brown’s position untenable. But instead Cruddas went to the cricket and wrote a piece for the Sunday Mirror that was widely seen as an endorsement of Brown.
But Cruddas’s position is actually more complex than simple loyalty. He is highly critical of Brown, saying, ‘There is no change agenda.’ But he seems even more frustrated with the plotters. ‘Everyone is running around saying you have to throw the leader in front of the train and that we need someone with presentational skills,’ he says. ‘It’s as if there is an on/off switch called “the leader” who will resolve these things. But we lost five million votes between 2001 and 2005 with coalitions splintering and fracturing. You can’t just throw a different body in there, it’s simply not good enough to suggest this will be a panacea.’
For Cruddas, policy is the key. ‘Brown has to think and think fast about what is the policy agenda, what are the issues that underline all of this decay in our support? Now if he doesn’t, there are certainly negative consequences in terms of a collision with the electorate and there is then also the fact that these issues will just fester and fester and every time we have a bumpy period everyone will strap on their suicide belts and off they go over the top. There has to be a reckoning: if he is going to survive, he has to have a reckoning around policy.’
One of Cruddas’s strengths is his detachment from the Westminster village; it is what allowed him to see the rise of the BNP long before other politicians did and to talk to voters in a language that resonates. But this same detachment causes him problems. He appears reluctant to acknowledge that you have to speculate to accumulate when it comes to political capital.
Interestingly, and perhaps in a sign that this is changing, Cruddas goes out of his way to praise James Purnell, who resigned on Thursday night with a spectacular call for Brown to do the same, both personally and intellectually. For months now, there has been a public courtship going on between the two men, an attempt to work out if these figures from very different wings of the party could work — and possibly run — together in a post-defeat Labour party. Cruddas stresses that he disagrees with Purnell’s call for Brown to go but says, ‘I understand what he’s done because I think he is being authentic, true to himself. I don’t think you can say the same of others who have simply resigned before, when we have still got candidates in the field, or have resigned after they claimed allegiance but then didn’t get the job they wanted.’ For Cruddas, ‘James is in stark contrast to those who talk from behind their hands,’ a reference to those who have remained in the Cabinet but continue to make clear their dissatisfaction with Brown.
Cruddas talks about Purnell ‘mining intellectual traditions in order to pull us out of the hole we’re in’. He says with a passion that almost propels him out of his chair — ‘I don’t like the way he’s being trashed, he’s a mate of mine.’ The prospect of Cruddas and Purnell running together seems far more realistic than that of Labour winning the next election.
Maybe for the plotters too much is about personality not policy, but Cruddas is guilty of not thinking about personality enough. He is reluctant to engage with the idea that Brown himself might be as much of a problem in communicating where Labour wants to take the country as the lack of policy. When I push him on whether dumping Brown might be necessary if not sufficient for a Labour revival, he — unusually for him — pauses for a long time before saying: ‘I don’t know, we’ll see, we’ll see. It depends on how much he acknowledges that this is a profound change, epochal.’
The question is if Brown doesn’t get it — and Brown shows no signs of doing so — will Cruddas call for a profound change in personnel as well as policy? That will be the test of whether Cruddas wants to be a player rather than just the most interesting voice on the sidelines.
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