I have just caught up with this fine study of Labour backbench dissent under Gordon Brown, by Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart (subscription). It describes a government and parliamentary party in a state of advanced psychological and political decay.
I remember being puzzled as a pupil by the explanation we were given at O-level for Clement Attlee’s failure to plough on, with his majority of three, in 1951, when he, in effect, just gave up and let the Conservatives win the election. The government was exhausted, we were told. Not much of a reason, I thought.
I understood better when I watched the collapse of the John Major administration at close quarters. That was a government large parts of which had lost the will to carry on.
Then, in 2009-10, we saw it again. Cowley and Stuart quote a Labour Party worker saying that, by early 2010, the “parliamentary party is done for, it’s clapped out, and knackered”. They comment:
It was getting harder to find MPs willing to fill parliamentary private secretary posts (the party stopped publishing lists, as the gaps were too obvious).
It’s only a small thing, and we knew the Brown government was worn out, but I didn’t know about that telling detail.
Eagle Eye 