Prime ministers are famously supposed to be able to chew gum and walk at the same time, but when you are flying over the Hindu Kush pondering the world's most fragile democracy and the fate of 8,000 British soldiers fighting in Helmand, it is hard to focus on a Lib Dem opposition supply day in the Commons.
While Gordon Brown was over the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan on Monday, the seeds of a terrible week were being sown at home, as the government blundered towards defeat in a vote over the rights of Gurkhas to settle in Britain. Twenty-seven Labour MPs rebelled, dozens more abstained, an emergency statement followed and the sense prevailed that Brown's authority had been critically undermined.
Miserable comparisons were made to the last days of John Major's premiership and historians noted the first government defeat in an opposition day debate since James Callaghan in 1978. A day later came further dispiriting climbdowns over MPs' expenses as the week of misjudgments dragged on.
"There should have been a figure back in London sorting this out," said one minister involved in the setback.
It was obvious from Monday that Labour was likely to lose the vote on the Gurkhas. It had taken more than six months to get a decision out of Whitehall on what to do, ever since a court ruled in September that the government had not been fair to veterans whose cases had been settled before 1997. The delay was largely because the Ministry of Defence did not have any money to pay the potential pension costs, but also because no one gripped the issue at the centre.
One whip said: "We thought two staged concessions, one to Martin Salter, and the other to George Howarth [both Labour MPs], might be enough to turn it round. But there were a group of MPs that were not listening. What is worrying is that the rebels and abstainers were not the usual suspects.
"We tried everything, but we were very despondent afterwards, saying the MPs were blind to argument. Some of them may have been cross about their second home allowance, but most of them just thought we had mishandled it. We could not get our message across."
A minister said: "One problem is that Gordon at prime minister's questions said this would cost a lot of money, but he did not say the next bit, which is that we have not got any money."
A senior minister stood back and looked at the wider lessons of Brown's first defeat of his premiership: "It's a cliche, but every government needs a John Prescott, or in Thatcher's case, a Willie Whitelaw, an enforcer.
"Brown needs someone to pull it all together. The obvious candidate is Ed Balls because he knows Gordon's mind, or perhaps Alan Johnson. Harriet Harman cannot do it because she is overstretched as it is. Jack Straw might have done it, but he seems to have lost his way, after the bill of rights proposals got shot down by the rest of the cabinet."
Someone like a Prescott might have questioned the wisdom of trying to handle the MPs' expenses issue by unveiling an initiative in a YouTube video. Faced by an increasingly strident rightwing press, it is easy to see why communications gurus favour bypassing papers such as the Daily Mail.
Brown presumably believed he was speaking to a youthful, disenchanted public, on one of the few issues that genuinely engages and infuriates them. But after he had made his first excruciating grin to camera, a good adviser would probably have put his hand over the lens, shouted "cut" and then binned the idea. "Come back Damian McBride, all is forgiven," say some, not wholly in jest.
Sometimes the medium can become the message and, ironically in the case of the supposed dinosaur Prescott, videos have worked unexpectedly well. But Brown had learnt early in his premiership to be authentically grave and his advisers have to stick to that. Even Downing Street's new speech writer, Michael Lea from the Daily Mail, will have to match his metaphors to the man.
But Brown's bigger worry came in the lethal criticism from the former home secretary David Blunkett that Labour had a void where its domestic policy should be. "Of course we will be judged by what we have done in terms of dealing with the economic crisis. But we will actually be judged on our vision for the next 10 to 15 years," he said yesterday.
The bulk of Blunkett's speech was an attempt to fill that void with his version of community-localised politics. Many will disagree with his specific proposals, but there are many Labour MPs like Blunkett, worried that Brown's natural instinct and knowledge of economics lead him to neglect the nexus of social, moral and domestic policy issues on which elections are traditionally fought.
Another minister notes the lack of a centrally driven strategy from No 10 to get the government's message out and tell voters in a concerted way what Labour stands for and where it wants to go. "Ministers in their departments are pushing out their stuff, working in their policy bubble, but there is little attempt to pull it together from the prime minister," the minister said.
"What we lack is determination, willpower and organisation," said one cabinet minister.
"He is good at economics, but not politics," said a Labour select committee chairman.
Another former minister argued: "The public will not thank us for what we have done in the past but on whether they judge we have any gas in the tank and some coherent ideas for the future."
No 10 replies that last week it pushed out big policies on an equality bill, the future of primary education through the Rose review, and fresh ideas about community crime prosecutors. But these stories were drowned out by defeats in parliament, rebellious former ministers and the threat of a flu pandemic.
Apart from yet another rethink inside Downing Street, there is no sign of an attempt to push the prime minister out. Only Frank Field, brilliant, but alone, openly calls for Brown to be toppled after the European elections in June.
Backbenchers would be unlikely to be goaded into revolt even if the party came third behind the Lib Dems in terms of the share of the vote or saw its vote drop below 25%. Most people feel they have been through that process last summer and, in the words of David Cameron, the party has made its strategic choice.
Cabinet ministers who are hardly supporters of Brown have this week been moved to near sympathy. One said: "Backbenchers keep kicking the shit out of Gordon and then wondering out loud why he appears damaged."
Another described the parliamentary Labour party as having gone "la la". Brown was the first PM to attempt to reform the expenses system. He said: "You could post a video on YouTube and announce you were giving them £10,000 each and they would still be unhappy." This cabinet minister, however, drew a line at stepping up to advise Brown.
Some ministers still insist that it is the recession alone that will determine the next general election. The stockmarket, looking at consumer confidence, may be enjoying a frisky spring but, in the real economy the news remains dire. Yet, if Brown can point to an upturn by late winter, the fate of 1,000 Gurkhas, and the second home allowance, will fade into a distant memory.
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