News-fright – The grim-reaper stalking Brown

The grim reaper: former whip stabs blunt kife into Brown

The political climate is beginning to heat up as the autumn leaves begin to fall in Westminster.   Brown was, and no doubt still is hoping, that September would bring an Indian summer of shine on his tainted administration and that he may be able to portray a lighter shade of Brown.  Instead the colours got darker for him on Friday.  A figure dressed head to toe in designer black with a garish, dark and weighty chain around her neck walked on to Westminster’s college green surrounded by the press pack and eventually, she made to the towers of the media in Millbank. 

“Losing my job doesn’t matter Kirsty” she told the BBC Newsnight’s presenter, she was doing it for the good of the party and speaking up for those on the backbenchers who don’t dare strike the wounds of poor public appeal that Brown has seeping from every Yougov and Mori wound.

Siobhan McDonagh maybe small fry compared to Brutus or even the chief whip.  But a whip she is.  Charged to defend the Prime Minister and even literally whip dissenting back-benchers into shape, she decided to lead a charge on Number Ten with chalice in hand and dent the scaffolding that is at present quite literally holding Downing Street up.  Will it end in a landslide for Brown of the sort that Blair never experienced?

The news came as Labour HQ admitted that several MPs had asked why leadership nomination papers had not been handed out ahead of the Labour Party conference in a fortnight’s time.   This is standard for the party and even Blair ran the risk that 20% of the parliamentary party – some 70 MPs at present – may try and cast him aside through hands in the air at party conference.

So why did she do it: “because I believe the debate is being had” in government and that they are  “not allowing the wider population in on it”.  Calls again for general election no doubt beckon from Tories voices with words like these, hardly the stuff of loyal party members let alone whips.  The public are only too part of this debate and the disgusted, obtuse voices can be heard in Wetherspoons to wine bars of contempt the public holds for the man who has longed to put GB into Great Britain.

“I want to know what the programme is” she said but you’re a government minister part of his team surely you must know cried Kirsty Wark, well “we’re not in it for the money” she said and apparently leadership candidates themselves could “come up with different ideas”.  Why not wait two weeks and see what Brown, his cabinet and inner circle come up with for the autumn conference?  Her position though she assured wasn’t anything new: she felt the same way she said when Tony Blair stepped down and team GB moved from 11 Downing street into number 10.  So why not say something at the time and instead take up the position of defending what you see as the indefensible?

Who knows; I’m not sure Siobhan knows herself.  “But you’re a loyal member of government there to shore-up support” as Kirsty eloquently put the bleeding obvious to McDonagh.  “Yeah” she said with a slight pause before going on to highlight her record.

So is Big Ben about to chime the clucking bell for Brown.  Hardly, it seems.   He survived Charles Clarke’s comments he’ll survive this rather thin assault.  It exposes once again to the public that the government is divided, concerned and in a self-effacing mess.  Thorns may sprout from many a Labour rose in the coming weeks and days.  Emily Thornberry herself came out at dusk to brandish McDonagh as a nobody and herself as a loyalist, maybe as a hint to fill Siobhan’s shoes and protect her Islington seat which hangs by a knife edge majority in Labour’s hands.

Hewitt and friends who write in Progress magazine next week that Labour needs “a convincing new narrative” are stating the obvious and maybe more unsavoury words for Brown and friends.  The story of who the author of this new narrative should be continues.