LONDON LETTER:Arguments that key decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan were Tony's not Gordon's do not convince
IS GORDON Brown in any sense personally liable and should he apologise to the British people?
The question looms large in debate here about the recession when politicians and commentators reflect on his previous tenure in Number 11 Downing Street.
As prime minister, Brown continues his mission to save the world, but the recurring charge is that it was as chancellor that Brown, who overly admired the City and presided over soft-touch regulation and a mountain of national and personal debt, emptied the treasury coffers and neglected to save for a rainy day.
This while Peter Mandelson officially declared New Labour to be “relaxed” about people getting filthy rich as the mighty Brown thought to end the economic cycle and “boom and bust”.
The question of an apology suggested itself in a different context last week, however, just as Brown prepared for the triumph (short-lived, perhaps) that was his chairmanship of the G20 summit.
These were, as has been widely remarked, among the happiest days of Brown’s premiership.
It would have been a hard heart that denied him as President Barack Obama lavished that famous gold dust on his Downing Street host.
As they affirmed their mutual belief in “the special relationship” and their “kinship of ideals”, Brown in turn was rapturous in his welcome.
Obama, he said, had not only changed America but also America’s relationship with the world. Even allowing for the diplomatic and rhetorical demands of the occasion, this must have struck many as absurdly overdone, given that the charismatic new president has barely been in office three months.
You did not need a doctorate from the Mandelson College of New Labour Spin, however, to decode the message – Brown’s Britain shares in the near universal delight at seeing the back of George W. Bush.
Which would be fine and dandy if Brown, like Obama, had just arrived as new kid on the block with a massive popular mandate for change. Nor is this to suggest the prime minister was being disingenuous.
This was a moment, indeed, when Brown could give clear and unequivocal voice to the instincts and sentiments of Old Labour as well as New, and of many British Conservatives as well.
New Labourites, remember, were as aghast as any when Bush “stole” his first election victory from Al Gore. That, of course, was before Tony Blair’s Downing Street instructed then Washington ambassador Christopher Meyer to get as close as humanly possible to the Bush administration and to stay close.
It was long, long before the “shoulder to shoulder” stand with the US in a world reordered by 9/11, the rush to war in Iraq, the failure of post-war planning, not to mention the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction.
It was long before the long periods of embarrassed Whitehall silence and denial that greeted the revelations about extraordinary rendition, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.
Loyal Brownites might reply that none of this happened on their man’s Number 10 watch.
Yet he was there as chancellor, funding the war – as he is now in Afghanistan. This despite a mounting toll of British fatalities and worries about mission creep, while his foreign office stands accused of seeking to prevent publication of court documents supporting Binyam Mohamed’s claim of British collusion in his torture in Morocco.
Blair’s Labour government tested the loyalty of those who believed Britain right to act with America, and then some.
Brown’s Labour government is open to the same charge – wanting to be seen standing firm in its global commitments while joining in the celebrations at the fall of Bush. Even some senior Conservatives stayed the course with Labour, viewing David Cameron’s post-war positioning on Iraq as opportunistic, privately acknowledging that a Conservative prime minister finding himself in Blair’s position would hardly have behaved differently.
Yet they too find it increasingly difficult to know what to make of British foreign policy. Obama and his voters might be clear as to the change he represents, but what are the changes from Labour’s immediate policy past that the ruling party’s leaders would have voters grasp and admire?
Is the war in Afghanistan the one Britain should have been fighting all along, for example – or something to be endured until America figures a way out?
More simply put, whatever the change Obama finally comes to represent, can Labour really expect to derive benefit from it, having acquiesced in so much of what went before?
Then Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith’s original cheer- leading for war in Iraq might leave Cameron open to the charge of opportunism. Yet he can certainly argue that it did not happen under his leadership.
Like President Obama, moreover, Cameron must know that the real and dangerous legacy of this period is that when a British prime minister next seeks to commit troops and treasure in face of an alleged real and present danger, the British public may not prove so willing to believe or ready to be led.