Think back to late September and you may remember there was an uprising. If this rebellion had been a form of food then it would have been the Lemon Popsicle Rebellion. There we all were – a sleepy Friday afternoon before the party conference season – sharpening our pencils and filling the car boot with fringe event flyers for our annual trade fair, oops, conference – when waddya know, but Siobhain McDonagh pops up on television, interviewed on the turf outside the House
of Commons, glorious in hair the colour of
a lemon popsicle.
She’d written to the Labour party asking for nomination papers to be sent out so the party could just check the pulse of Gordon’s popularity. Siobhain says she had done so in secret but Downing Street found out and thought they would, er, stick the lemon popsicle out in the sun so it might
melt before, well, before anyone else bit.
Well, from up and close to some of those involved in the Lemon Popsicle Rebellion, Downing Street had nothing to fear. Campaign with the militant precision of the Baader-Meinhof brigade this was not. One ‘rebel’ supplied a list of others he believed had also been involved in the letter writing campaign but one of the names on his list of co-conspirators didn’t ring a bell to The Insider. ‘Ah yes,’ said letter writer said. ‘You’re right. I never actually did write a letter. Someone told me they were doing it and I thought it a good idea and so was going to but…’
‘But, what?’ ‘Well I think what happened was that I put down the phone and someone else rang immediately – I think it was my husband – and he had a shopping list for me, and well, the letter writing just went straight out of my head.’ Gordon had little to fear.
The Downing Street reshuffle
A couple of episodes later in the mini-series that has been the last month in the Labour party there came a reshuffle. While most so-called reshuffles are clearly just shuffles – someone here, someone there – this one really earned the ‘re’ at the front of its name (that’s ‘re’ as in re-wind and re-tread and re-peat) with the return of Peter Mandelson. Very soon after returning to Downing Street Mandelson unhappily experienced a pain in his bowels and had to have a kidney stone operation. The Insider hopes it is no reflection on the state of the party but the man is now to be heard rattling along the corridors of power with the sound of one foil and plastic pill packet clashing against another foil and plastic pill packet in his blazer pocket – the hospital were not 100 per cent successful in ‘blasting’ the troublesome kidney stone. Instead, in the business secretary’s own words, it has merely ‘gravitatved south for the winter’.
But while the return to cabinet of a man more Blairite than Blair signalled to the parliamentary party that Team Tony were now thoroughly on side, a lesser spotted fact for you reveals that Tiny Team Tony – junior ministers loosely defined as mini-Blairs – had a shot across the bows. Who were the only two ministers to have a complete change to their junior ministerial levels, meaning they had to go into the Commons and do ministerial statements with completely inexperienced staff? David Miliband and James Purnell.
The last day of 42 days
But all of the above was ‘BC’ – before the Crisis. Now we are ‘AD’ – After the Downturn. Gordon’s bail-out bailed him out, and now talks of rebellions are as little as memories of drunken arguments. Quickly key bills were junked under cover of a) an enormous story, and b) the relative and, highly likely to be temporary, acquiescence of the both the Labour benches and Tory benches. When the night of the Lords vote on 42 days came around it was a shock, but somehow understandable, that the government, facing almost certain defeat, were going to junk the attempt to get the Lords to vote through 42 days. After all, at that point Gordon had a European summit to prepare for. When Atlas shouldered the burdens of the world, do you think he spent the days before he picked up the globe trying to avert a parliamentary defeat? No. He’ll have spent time in with the Lucozade doing some yoga.
But calm Gordon wasn’t. Apparently he was so worried about support for 42 days – for a bill he knew he was going to lose – falling below 100 Lords, that he spent the day of the vote ringing round Lords to make sure those his whips informed him were in favour, came out to vote. We’ve heard of whipping the winning side, but whipping to make sure the loss is not disastrous? The Insider thinks life might be too short.