Summary
Features - Viewpoint essay
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Extract
The limits of expertise.
It is Gordon Brown's unfortunate fate that history has revealed how much he relied on Tony Blair for his political success, but will never reveal quite how much Blair depended on Brown. Under Blair, Brown was insulated from all the aspects of governing that proved so uncomfortable for him--offering a story, controlling the news agenda, communicating to swing voters, asserting clear medium-term ambitions. Freed from the obligation to deal with these issues or foreign policy, Brown was privileged to focus exclusively on domestic policy formation.
Looking back, the dual leadership of Blair and Brown was, inadvertently, a political master-stroke, converting weaknesses into strengths. Compared to the number-crunching Brown, Blair was able to appear 'Presidential', even if that quality eventually did for him; compared to Blair, Brown was able to appear authentic and expert at policy-formation. It was the unglamorous, numbers-heavy Chancellor that was wheeled out during the 2005 election campaign to convince voters that Labour had real substance. It was this same unglamorous, numbers-heavy man that voters became so dissatisfied with. One lesson that emerges from the Brown premiership is that there never was a contradiction between 'spin' and 'substance', but that the two are interdependent. It is precisely because naked policy does not result in a coherent political narrative that spin becomes necessary. At the same time, political positioning and story-telling is of little use inside the machinery of Whitehall bureaucracies, which makes pol...See the full content of this document
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