Gordon Brown has been accused of ordering his cabinet about, hogging the limelight when there is good news to announce, and letting ministers take the flak when something goes wrong.
When it gets to the surreal stage of John Denham being wheeled out to tell a TV crew, ‘I work with Gordon … I can say I have not been bullied,’ then we know there is an element of truth to these charges.
But does it matter? For all of Brown’s strengths, no one ever called him a collegiate team player, any more than they called Margaret Thatcher the Aluminium Lady for her pliability.
And it’s hardly a new phenomenon for politicians to be glory seekers, the equivalent of the goal-hanger in playground football games who stands about waiting for a tap-in chance which he can claim credit for. Tony Blair infamously sent out a memo asking for ‘eye catching initiatives’ with which he could be associated personally.
It may seem greedy, but it makes sense politically. In these days when an election is more than ever a beauty contest between the party leaders, Labour needs voters to go to the polls in 2009 or 2010 saying, ‘I’m voting Labour because Gordon has got it right on A, B and C.’ It doesn’t want them blaming the PM for X, Y and Z that went wrong.
In business, we expect Richard Branson to be the front man for anything his Virgin companies achieve, even though there must be other executives coming up with the ideas. If a junior elf thinks up a great new way to make or deliver toys, he knows Santa will take the credit – but he hopes that his contribution will be noticed and appreciated, and he’ll soon be a middle-ranking elf and spoken of as a rising star of the workshop.
So it is natural for party leaders to take all of the glory and none of the blame. It would be of more concern if the same thing happened throughout a party, so that each portfolio-holder was jockeying for position with their deputy and no one ever pulled together.
Which is why David Cameron will be alarmed by a report in the Sunday Telegraph’s new Westminster column, Portcullis, about how the Tories let Jacqui Smith off the hook over the revelation that 5,000 illegal immigrants were cleared to work as security guards.
When the home secretary faced a make-or-break dispatch box appearance at the height of the crisis, David Davis, the normally pugnacious shadow home secretary, appeared to go easy on her. According to Portcullis, this is because it was Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister and Davis’s underling, who had obtained crucial leaked emails proving that Smith kept quiet for four months after she learned about the problem. Green had briefed journalists on the emails without consulting his boss.
When the Commons clash came, the story goes, Davis went easy on Smith because he didn’t want his colleague to get the credit for toppling her.
Cameron’s advisers know the critical importance of building up the leader’s image, hence the trips to glaciers and Rwanda. But whether they want Davis, a former leadership contender, to be quite so ruthless in pursuit of his own turf wars is another matter.
For a long time now, my betting exchange has been offering odds of 6/4 or shorter on the outcome of the next election being a hung parliament. In other words, punters reckon there’s a 40 per cent chance that no party will achieve an overall majority.
I simply cannot understand this level of expectation. Our voting system is heavily geared towards giving one party an overall majority. Of the l7 postwar elections, only one of them – in Feburary 1974 – produced a hung parliament.
What’s more, a hung parliament is more likely when the third party does well, and at the moment the Lib Dems are hardly flying high. In traders’ parlance: sell.