New Year round-up: Labour

Happy new year! This is the first of three round up posts to begin the year, starting, appropriately enough, with how the Labour party performed in the 2007 polls.

Looking back at 2007 the first half of the year was Tony Blair's long goodbye. Labour started the year behind the Tories and fell back further, beset by cash for honours. In March 2007 they sunk into the 20s in a couple of polls, over ten points behind the Tories. There seemed to be a public appetite for change, a tide that can easily sweep a government from office. Labour's hope was that Brown would be that change, he would draw a line under Blair and be a new beginning, a government of solid, reliable competence compared to his predecessor's spin.

When Gordon Brown took over he got a bigger boost than most expected, the media lavished adoration upon him and the pressure was suddenly on David Cameron (though we'll look at the Tories in another post). For a short while it seemed as though what Labour had hoped, that the change in leadership would be the change that the public wanted, would indeed happen. The temporary boost became the foundation for election fever - I think what made the speculation really serious was the Northern Rock crisis. Far from damaging Labour's reputation for economic competence or denting their lead, it suggested that it could stand up to events. What would have happened if Brown had gone to the country will be one of those great political counterfactuals in the future, I expect we'll have some fun with it at some point. Of course it didn't, and since then everything has been bad for Labour.

The media seemed to turn against Brown during the Conservative conference, from treating him almost as the second coming during the summer, they have since been unremittingly hostile. The decision not to have an election was seen as a humiliation, Northern Rock has refused to have a neat and tidy ending, a new party funding row erupted, the government lost large amounts of confidential data. In the polls Labour have fallen to the low thirties - roughly comparable to the sort of level they were before the handover to Brown, figures for PM approval, government approval, best party on the economy, forced choice and so on are all as they were at the tail end of Blair.

We've started to see commentators ask whether Brown is dead in the water. There are even occasional bits of press speculation about challenges to his leadership, I don't personally find them convincing, but is Brown's position hopeless? We'll come back to the actual electoral maths when we look at the Tories, the question here is can Brown turn things around, or is he doomed to trail behind the Tories in levels of support?

First lets look at what actually happened to Labour's support in 2007. There are three possibilities: either Labour has actually improved from their position under Blair and at least some of the "Brown bounce" was genuine, but that underlying recovery is currently being masked by temporary damage from events; or, Labour did genuinely recover with a new leader, but the problems they've faced have highlighted Brown's weaknesses as leader and undermined their competence, permanently damaging them; or, they never actually recovered in the slightest, Brown failed to be the change and the current standings are a return to underlying pre-Brown position now the publicity boost has gone.

Looking carefully at the polls from the time it was a Brown boost, not a Labour one. Questions that referred to Gordon Brown by name saw very positive ratings, but questions asking about Labour or 'the government' without mentioning Brown were less positive. While Brown had positive approval ratings, the government's approval ratings remained strongly negative. Perhaps if things had panned out differently, Brown would have been able to transfer some of his own popularity onto the government, but it never happened. That's not to say that it was entirely a temporary boost and the problems that have beset Labour over the last couple of months had nothing to do with it, I suspect that had Labour not suffered things like the embarrassment of the uncalled election, the funding and data loss crisis Brown would have been able to transform some of his temporary popularity into more substantial improvements in his party's reputation.

In the event he didn't have the chance, or didn't use the chance when he had it. When Brown had the opportunity, he used it instead to make life difficult for the Conservatives, shoot their foxes, box them into positions, and embarrass them with defections or "semi-defections"... but not to renew Labour or set out a vision that would have differentiated his Labour government from what had gone before. When the honeymoon came to an abrupt end with "chicken Saturday", that too was a self-inflicted wound, though the nails were banged into the opportunity's coffin by things like the funding scandal and the data loss which probably can't be laid directly at Gordon Brown's door. In my opinion what happened to Labour is that Brown squandered his chance to change a temporary boost into a permanent one and Labour are now back where they were in April 2007. The difference is that then they had the hope of renewal under Brown, now there is now no ace left up their sleeve to play.

So is Brown dead in the water? I don't normally make predictions on the blog that can't be based on polls alone, though I guess I didn't do that badly with Brown. Back in December 2006 I predicted that despite the big Conservative leads all the hypothetical "Brown as leader" polls showed, in practice Brown would get a big boost as leader, giving Labour a healthy lead in the polls, but that in the longer term the hypothetical polls would be a pretty accurate picture, with the Conservatives having large leads. The reasoning I gave then was that the only explanation for the negative polls was that Brown was disliked, because they certainly weren't because people thought Brown would be incompetent or ineffective. If they had Brown would have been able to prove people wrong, but he's never going to be able to change his personality.

I wrote then that people tend to ascribe positive qualities to likeable people, irrespective of how competent they actually are, and vice-versa with dislikeable people. Malcolm Gladwell calls this the Warren Harding error, after the inept US President who looked and sounded Presidential and therefore won despite being a klutz.

I think Brown's character, specifically the lack of charisma or warmth will prevent him being able to bring it back. When problems hit Brown will never be able get away with a winning smile and a "I'm a pretty straight sort of guy" or "well, John is John", he can't charm he was out of problems, can't convince people that, whatever has gone wrong, he is fundamentally a decent chap doing his best. Neither has he yet shown any ability to project a vision or purpose for his government that the public can relate to, perhaps in other circumstances that wouldn't matter, competence would be enough, but to differentiate himself from Blair he needs to. He also doesn't seem to have the knack of keeping the press onside - from having Fleet Street at his feet he seems to have alienated them rapidly, without a turnaround in press attitude it will be difficult for Brown to turnaround the government's position.

So putting my cards on the table, I think Brown is finished. I don't mean that expect Labour to attempt to get rid of him, but that I doubt Labour under him have the ability to regain a lead in the polls. It wouldn't surprise me if they recovered slightly as they get away from the negative news stories of the last few months, but I think the underlying position is now a Conservative lead. It doesn't necessarily mean that Labour will lose the next election, they have an advantage in the electoral arithmetic, there is always the potential for "events" to change the whole world around and while I think governments lose elections, rather than oppositions winning them, it is still possible for an opposition to lose one. I'll come to that in the next post.