“The psychology of the men at the top has mattered more than any previous government” states Andrew Rawnsley, in defence of his new tome, “The End of the Party”. This is the book in which Gordon Brown is taken to task as a bully and a harasser, if the media headlines that followed are to be believed.
Rawnsley hides behind the unnamed, unknown source, while damning the prime minister with the faint praise that he is not “completely illegitimately aspiring to get credit for softening recession”(They talk like that down south I believe.)
Does character matter in the way that Rawnsley suggests? It is now well known that Winston Churchill, the Tories darling, spend most of the war downing well over the current Government’s suggested weekly alcohol allowance on a daily basis, while the main problem with the joke that Margaret Thatcher believed that all of her cabinet were vegetables is that she truly believed it. Should the fact that one on current standards was an alcoholic and the other a sociopath be the predominant way in which their administrations are judged? Or is it there are other measures or standards that they have to meet up to?
No one condones bullying, least of all those of us within a trade union who have had to deal with it. But do assertions based on anonymous sources convince anyone? Rawsley argues that the more Downing St denies the stories, the more that it demonstrates the paranoia at the heart of government. As was said of another famous denial in a scandal, “he would say that wouldn’t he?”
Where Rawnsley writes about psychology, perhaps the real story is one about ideology, and about the failure of New Labour to break with the neo liberalism that continues to haunt their policies. As Alistair Darling has introduced a break with a simple reliance on market mechanisms and has daringly nationalised the banks, he has been unable to move further and tackle the worship of high finance that remains the foundation of much of government policy. Real economics, rather than cod psychology, is the key.
Perhaps Mr Rawnsley would be more suited to a job as an agony aunt in a red top tabloid. Can he tell us where Ashley and Cheryl went wrong?
