Could this woman be Gordon Brown's smiling assassin?
I DON’T know where Gordon Brown plans to celebrate Christmas but he would be well advised not to make arrangements to host it at Chequers or 10 Downing Street.
Because it is overwhelmingly likely that those two houses will no longer be at his disposal come the end of the year.
Conspiring Cabinet ministers are giving minimal pledges of loyalty when challenged in public. It is a tactic redolent of Conservative ministers during that party’s many leadership manoeuvrings and will fool few intelligent onlookers. That means action must come soon.
The plot is being prepared in the expectation of Labour losing the Glenrothes by-election. Such a defeat will be seized upon by rebels who are kicking themselves for not acting more decisively after the Glasgow East defeat in the summer.
Mr Brown’s best chance of thwarting the plotters is to play a leading role in the Glenrothes campaign and somehow contrive a Labour win but that is a very long shot.
She believes a leader should not put his own interests first.
The PM may not even get that chance. There is a school of thought within the Cabinet which says the inevitable should not be postponed any longer.
Some ministers are pondering an attempt to oust him as early as next week through the threat of mass resignations from the frontbench.
Such excited talk among ministers and their aides in the bars of conference hotels is probably the result of Dutch courage but the Cabinet consensus that Mr Brown will have to go is deadly serious.
I attended a fringe meeting organised on Sunday by the Blairite pressure group Progress and saw half a dozen senior ministers damn Brown simply by failing to say anything about him at all. It was an extraordinary omission given the PM’s plea for loyalty and questions swirling around about his future.
Some ministers went even further with coded attacks on Brown’s leadership style. Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell spoke of the importance of speaking to voters “with empathy and emotional intelligence” knowing that Brown is widely derided for lacking these very qualities.
Culture Secretary Andy Burnham and Housing Minister Caroline Flint said Labour must do more for people who “work hard and play by the rules” in the knowledge that Brown is notorious for failing to see beyond his desire to channel taxpayers’ money into the pockets of welfare claimants.
Most cuttingly of all, Communities Secretary Hazel Blears observed: “We are not going to win by reading out lists of our achievements or by demeaning the Conservative record in government.” These are the central tactics of Brown and his diminishing cabal of acolytes.
Though some find her chirpy demeanour grating, Ms Blears is by far the most interesting member of Brown’s rebel Cabinet. She is a plain-speaking northerner willing to admit that excessive immigration has shattered once-settled working-class communities and that Labour needs to “plug into the innate ambition of decent, hardworking voters”.
A couple of years back there was a TV drama called The Amazing Mrs Pritchard about a supermarket manager who rose to become prime minister. Jane Horrocks took the title role. There is something of Mrs Pritchard about the diminutive Ms Blears.
A growing number of Labour MPs hope she could do for the party what Sarah Palin has done for the Republicans in America: connect it with ordinary people and distance it from the metropolitan elite.
No other putative replacement for Brown could hope to do this apart from Health Secretary Alan Johnson, who says he does not want the job. David Miliband, Harriet Harman and Jack Straw are all metropolitan elitists who speak in the language of the political class, not the supermarket check-out queue.
Tory insiders reckon they have the beating of any of these and believe voters have had enough of Labour altogether but admit that Blears would be much more “difficult to play”.
Almost any attack on her from a Conservative could come across as either chauvinistic or snobbish and risk a backlash from the electorate. David Cameron, in particular, would find himself severely constrained during jousts at Prime Minister’s Questions.
“He would have to love her to death,” says one Tory source. “We would just have to hope that the public would find her incessant chirpiness too much and focus on the shortcomings of Labour’s record in office. But we would not make the mistake of underestimating her.”
Many MPs who supported Ms Blears in Labour’s deputy leadership contest have publicly called for Brown to be dumped. When the time comes for the Cabinet to tell him the game is up her colleagues believe that she will be first in the queue.
“She is a natural loyalist but believes that a leader should not put his own interests above those of the party he leads,” claims one MP.