Choppy waters and a creaking vessel

Does Captain Gordon Brown have the skills to navigate into safety - or is there an iceberg in his path? Political Editor John Hipwood looks ahead to the Labour Party Conference.

At about half past three next Tuesday afternoon Gordon Brown will receive a standing ovation from an audience of Labour activists, MPs and trade unionists in the main hall at the Manchester Central.

Some in the audience might sit on their hands, but the vast majority at the Labour Party conference will be on their feet clapping in a huge show of unity.

Something similar happened in the same conference hall two years ago when Tony Blair made his keynote speech to the conference. Within eight months he would have left 10 Downing Street - and his audience knew he was on his way out.

This time around, no one knows what the Prime Minister’s future will be. Mr Brown too could be out of office, although he won’t go voluntarily.

The shockwaves felt across the world by the finanical earthquake in the United States, including the creation of a mega-bank through the merger of Lloyds TSB and the troubled Halifax/Bank of Scotland, will play both for and against the Labour leader.

On the positive side for him personally is the likelihood that demands for his head, or at the very least for a leadership debate, are likely to diminish in the current dire economic circumstances. Gordon is solid in a crisis, the argument goes.

On the negative side, those dire circumstances will have an impact on every household in Britain either directly or indirectly through dearer mortgages, continuing borrowing difficulties and job losses.

In such conditions, the traditional and biggest target to kick is the government, so there will be no long-term comfort for Mr Brown, Chancellor Alistair Darling or anyone associated with the Labour administration.

Keynote speech

Mr Darling will be making his keynote speech to the conference a little over 24 hours before Mr Brown. They will be singing from the same hymn sheet, and they will be rehearsing their lines religiously over the weekend.

The message will be “steady-as-she-goes, stability, no risks with the UK’s finances” and lots of other phrases designed to give the impression that they still have their hands on the wheel, steering a course through the economic storm.

They are the experienced officers who can see us into calmer waters, say the PM’s midshipmen. Who would trust those wet-behind-the-ears sailors David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg?

But will anybody outside Manchester Central be listening? Judging by the latest opinion poll yesterday, putting Labour a staggering 28 per cent behind the Tories, the public have given up on Messrs Brown and Co.

This is the reason that backbench MPs plus one junior whip and one junior minister - none of them the usual troublemakers - have called for a leadership contest.

They simply don’t believe that Mr Brown is the man who can take Labour back to a position where it stands at least half a chance of stopping the Conservatives winning what now seems certain to be a spring 2010 general election.

The extent of the disaffection, disappointment and dismay on Labour’s backbenches is illustrated by the language used by former minister George Howarth, who said Mr Brown was about as popular as Neville Chamberlain after Hitler had invaded Norway.

Mr Howarth is a straight-talking Scouser and a loyalist who isn’t fearful of the loss of his own seat in the Commons. The people of Knowsley North and Sefton East on Merseyside will not be voting in a Tory MP at the next election.

Autumn election 

Disaffection, disappointment and dismay will surface from time to time in Manchester over the next few days, but it was another ‘D’ - for dithering - which started the rot for Mr Brown just about a year ago.

Some of his advisers, fearing that the economy was going to turn ugly, wanted the new PM to call an autumn election to take advantage of Labour’s lead in the opinion polls.

Mr Brown hesitated, neither running with the idea nor killing it off. When the opinion polls turned against him on the back of a successful Conservative conference, the prospect of becoming Britain’s shortest-serving premier in modern times was enough to scare him off altogether.

Since then it’s been a long slide downhill for Mr Brown personally and the Labour Party in general, with milestones including a rebellion over his last decision as Chancellor to dump the 10p tax rate; big losses in the local elections; Boris Johnson’s victory over Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral poll; and disastrous by-election defeats in Crewe & Nantwich and Glasgow East, not forgetting a humiliating lost deposit in Henley.

The tipping point for Labour MPs will not come in Manchester over the next five days. Mr Brown will deliver an adequate if not scintillating conference speech (he doesn’t do scintillating), and the message will be hammered home that now is not the time to rock the boat with calls for a leadership election.

Does that mean it will be OK to stand up in the dinghy in six months’ time? Well no, Mr Brown’s supporters won’t want a leadership debate then either.

The tipping point could be defeat for Labour in the Glenrothes by-election, a constituency next door to Mr Brown’s own seat, although it’s not certain that would be enough to make any mutiny meaningful.

Someone suggested I take my wellies to Manchester to wade through all the blood on the floor.

I don’t think I’ll need them - just yet.