Published: 7:47PM BST 13 May 2010
With the corpse of New Labour's government still warm on the mortician's slab, an inquest into the death of its salesmen has already begun. David Miliband, the bookies' favourite to take over as leader, says he will tour the country to find out what went wrong. At the risk of doing his party an undeserved favour, let's save Bananaman the cost of a trip.
Despite its record of fiscal incompetence, constitutional vandalism and disregard for Middle England, Gordon Brown's administration ought never to have collapsed. It had, after all, created for itself a client class of supplicant voters. As part of a grand plan for permanent office, more than one million immigrants were handed British passports (80 per cent of first-generation arrivals vote Labour) and 900,000 workers added to the public-sector payroll.
More pernicious still, Mr Brown and his ministers were delighted to overlook a grotesque distortion in the make-up of parliamentary boundaries, which meant that a 30 per cent vote for Labour produced about 300 seats, whereas the same percentage for the Conservatives delivered only 200 seats. In short, just about everything that could have been done to bend the system in New Labour's favour was in place by the time the election was called.
The problem, however, was that the project had been constructed upon a moral cesspit. The party's membership had been taken prisoner by a gang of desperadoes who clung to a conviction that honesty and integrity were disposable luxuries, and substance an unwelcome substitute for propaganda. The upshot was a dystopian regime in which Lord Mandelson and Alastair Campbell were recalled from ignominy to orchestrate a campaign of lavish deceit.
Together they became Mr Brown's very own Squealer, the insidious porker in Animal Farm who manipulates language to justify his boss's tyranny, while limiting debate and confusing the lower orders. In extremis, when awkward questions persist, Squealer fires off statistics to "prove" that life is improving, and warns darkly against the return of the farm's previous owner.
Lord Mandelson had twice been ejected from Cabinet over improper conduct. Mr Campbell was a central figure in the work of fiction that masqueraded as a security dossier on Saddam Hussein's "threat" to the United Kingdom. They had stripped themselves of legitimacy, yet were regarded by Mr Brown as uniquely qualified to help him retain the keys to No 10. It was a revolting union of unprincipled, unelected, unloved charlatans.
As the campaign developed, it was soon clear that New Labour was not going to win another Commons majority. After a decade of the government's chicanery, voters had had enough. Ministers, of course, blamed persecution by the press (even The Guardian deserted), but it was Mr Brown's financial mismanagement that hung like a burning tyre round his MPs' necks.
With the corpse of New Labour's government still warm on the mortician's slab, an inquest into the death of its salesmen has already begun. David Miliband, the bookies' favourite to take over as leader, says he will tour the country to find out what went wrong. At the risk of doing his party an undeserved favour, let's save Bananaman the cost of a trip.
Despite its record of fiscal incompetence, constitutional vandalism and disregard for Middle England, Gordon Brown's administration ought never to have collapsed. It had, after all, created for itself a client class of supplicant voters. As part of a grand plan for permanent office, more than one million immigrants were handed British passports (80 per cent of first-generation arrivals vote Labour) and 900,000 workers added to the public-sector payroll.
More pernicious still, Mr Brown and his ministers were delighted to overlook a grotesque distortion in the make-up of parliamentary boundaries, which meant that a 30 per cent vote for Labour produced about 300 seats, whereas the same percentage for the Conservatives delivered only 200 seats. In short, just about everything that could have been done to bend the system in New Labour's favour was in place by the time the election was called.
The problem, however, was that the project had been constructed upon a moral cesspit. The party's membership had been taken prisoner by a gang of desperadoes who clung to a conviction that honesty and integrity were disposable luxuries, and substance an unwelcome substitute for propaganda. The upshot was a dystopian regime in which Lord Mandelson and Alastair Campbell were recalled from ignominy to orchestrate a campaign of lavish deceit.
Together they became Mr Brown's very own Squealer, the insidious porker in Animal Farm who manipulates language to justify his boss's tyranny, while limiting debate and confusing the lower orders. In extremis, when awkward questions persist, Squealer fires off statistics to "prove" that life is improving, and warns darkly against the return of the farm's previous owner.
Lord Mandelson had twice been ejected from Cabinet over improper conduct. Mr Campbell was a central figure in the work of fiction that masqueraded as a security dossier on Saddam Hussein's "threat" to the United Kingdom. They had stripped themselves of legitimacy, yet were regarded by Mr Brown as uniquely qualified to help him retain the keys to No 10. It was a revolting union of unprincipled, unelected, unloved charlatans.
As the campaign developed, it was soon clear that New Labour was not going to win another Commons majority. After a decade of the government's chicanery, voters had had enough. Ministers, of course, blamed persecution by the press (even The Guardian deserted), but it was Mr Brown's financial mismanagement that hung like a burning tyre round his MPs' necks.
So, is anyone in any doubt why the UK is in such dire economic straits?
